Scraping FDA Drug Approval Databases for Pharma Intelligence

The Value of FDA Approval Data The FDA approves hundreds of drugs annually, and each approval triggers stock movements, competitor responses, and market shifts. Pharma companies, investors, and researchers all need this data — but the FDA's website is notoriously difficult to navigate programmatically. Let's build a scraper that extracts structured approval data from FDA databases. Target Databases The FDA maintains several key databases: Drugs@FDA — approved drug products with labels Orange Book — patent and exclusivity data FAERS — adverse event reports Setup pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pandas For production scraping, use ScraperAPI to avoid blocks from government sites that rate-limit aggressively. Scraping Drugs@FDA via OpenFDA API import requests import pandas as pd from datetime import datetime , timedelta def get_recent_approvals ( days = 30 ): """ Fetch recent drug approvals from FDA. """ end = datetime . now () start = end - timedelta ( days = days ) date_range = f " [