@pipeworx/tga-artg

TGA ARTG — the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods: every medicine, biological and medical device approved for supply in Australia. Search by product, active ingredient, sponsor or manufacturer, or pull the full record for one ARTG entry — sponsor, every ingredient with strength, indications, and links to its Product Information (PI) and Consumer Medicine Information (CMI) documents.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1681+ live data sources.

Scope — Australia, and only Australia

For the US use openfda; EU-wide, ema-medicines; UK, mhra-uk; Canada, health-canada-drugs; Spain, aemps-cima. Tools are prefixed artg_ so they never win a generic drug question.

Related MCP server: mhra-uk

Tools

Every response carries source_url (the exact upstream request) and data_as_of (fetch time — this is a live proxy, so there is no separate published version). status is the register's own value, or unknown when the source omits it; it is never inferred.

Paging and enumeration

artg_search and artg_list take a 0-based offset and return total, has_more and next_offset, taken from the upstream's own TotalRecords — so paging is exact, not inferred from a full page. Measured 2026-09-25: the whole register is 97,087 entries; entry_type: "Medicine Registered" is 20,037, "Medicine" 34,379. A full sweep of registered medicines is ~201 calls.

Arguments a tool does not implement are refused with an error, not ignored. Until fleet #2422 offset was accepted and silently dropped, so an enumeration loop re-read page one forever and reported success.

Auth

Keyless. No registration.

Data source — NOT the documented "ARTG Search" tool

• https://data.tga.gov.au/ARTGSearch/ARTGWebService.svc/JSON/ARTGValueSearch/ — the WCF JSON web service that actually backs the register.

The TGA's own documented ARTG Search tool — linked from tga.gov.au and, as of 2026, a beta Power Apps/Power BI portal at compliance.health.gov.au/artg — is interactive-only: a rendered visual with no query API behind it. tga.gov.au itself is also unreachable from our egress (its Akamai front end times out on every request, including a bare static PDF — a silent connection hold, not a 403). This pack instead calls the JSON web service that genuinely backs the register, at the separate, reachable host data.tga.gov.au — the same service TGA's own internal client library (aehrc/tga-feed-client on GitHub) is built against. It is keyless, live, and answers per query — a proxy, not a mirror.

Things the next person would otherwise rediscover

• The path segment must be uppercase JSON. Lowercase json (the form quoted in most third-party documentation, including the aehrc client's own example config) 404s with a generic WCF "Endpoint not found" HTML page — which is a 200-shaped failure if you don't check for an HTML body where JSON was expected. This pack throws explicitly if the response starts with <.

• pagestart/pageend are a 1-indexed, INCLUSIVE RECORD RANGE, not a page number. pagestart=3&pageend=5 returns records 3, 4 and 5 (three rows). Omitting both silently returns the entire ARTG register (25,000+ active entries) in ARTG-ID order, ignoring every other filter — every call here sends an explicit pagestart=1/pageend=<limit>.

• ARTGValueSearch filtered by licenceid alone returns the single full record — there is no separate working lookup-by-ID endpoint on this host (ARTGEntryJson 404s), so artg_entry is built on the same search operation with licenceid as the only filter.

• dateStart/dateEnd are in the service's WSDL and do nothing. Probed 2026-09-25 with ISO and dd/mm/yyyy formats, alone and with other filters: the total never changes. So artg_recent walks back from the tail of the ID-ordered register instead (IDs are issued sequentially; the newest entries are last) and stops at the first page entirely before since, scanning at most 500 entries and saying complete: false if that was not enough. It sees NEW entries only — a cancellation or variation to an existing entry carries no date here.

• Large ranges are slow. 500 rows took 34s on 2026-09-25; pages are capped at 100.

• www.tga.gov.au is unreachable from our network — do not build against it. data.tga.gov.au (a distinct host, no Akamai) is what actually answers.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tga-artg": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/tga-artg/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/tga-artg/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1681+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/artg_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"ingredient":"paracetamol","limit":3}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/artg_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tga-artg": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-tga-artg"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-tga-artg

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Tga Artg data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT