OpenFDA data extractor

Import a new customer’s OpenFDA data — animal veterinary adverse events, drug adverse events, drug ndc library, and drug product labelling, and 5 more object types — into your product as normalised, relational tables. Vern handles OpenFDA’s auth, pagination and rate limits, so onboarding a customer off OpenFDA doesn’t mean building and maintaining that plumbing yourself.

Start a migration Browse all extractors

Objects extracted: 9
Incremental: —
Authentication: Managed by Vern

Export coverage

What Vern pulls from OpenFDA

Know exactly what comes across before you migrate. Every object below is normalised into typed tables with referential keys preserved, so the relationships between a customer's records survive the import.

Animal veterinary adverse events
Drug adverse events
Drug ndc library
Drug product labelling
Drug recall enforcement reports
Drugs
Food adverse events
Food enforcement reports
Tobacco problems reports

Managed by Vern

The parts you'd otherwise build yourself

Authentication

Vern collects whatever this source needs to authenticate, stores it encrypted in a vault, and attaches it to every request. Credentials never enter the agent transcript.

Pagination

Vern detects and handles OpenFDA's paging model — cursor, page number or offset — internally, and returns one consistent, de-duplicated result set. You import a customer's complete data without ever managing a page token.

Rate limits

API sources rarely publish their real rate ceiling until you hit a 429 mid-import, and many silently cap page size. Vern queues and throttles requests to stay under the limit, so a partial pull never lands a customer in your product with missing data.

Output shape

Normalised JSON per object with referential keys preserved and timestamps in ISO 8601. Delivered as JSON or CSV, pushed to your API or webhook, or loaded straight into your application database.

Schema drift

If OpenFDA changes what it returns between migrations, the agent notices the difference against what it recorded last time and raises it, rather than importing a customer with a column quietly missing.

What it learns

Everything Vern works out about OpenFDA's quirks — field formats, enum values, ID and date patterns — is written down against the source and applied automatically to every customer you migrate off it afterwards.

API quickstart

Run a OpenFDA migration from your own product

Create the migration, let the agent extract and map, then pull the result out — without your customer ever seeing a Vern dashboard.

app.vern.so/api/v1

API=https://app.vern.so/api/v1
KEY="x-api-key: $VERN_API_KEY"
JSON="Content-Type: application/json"

# 1 — create a migration against OpenFDA
ID=$(curl -sX POST $API/migrations -H "$KEY" -H "$JSON" \
  -d '{"name":"Acme onboarding","source":"OpenFDA"}' \
  | jq -r .migration.id)

# 2 — hand over the customer's credentials for this run
curl -X POST $API/migrations/$ID/source-connection -H "$KEY" -H "$JSON" \
  -d '{"credentials": { ... }}'

# 3 — the agent extracts, maps and previews, stopping before it writes
curl -X POST $API/migrations/$ID/runs -H "$KEY" -H "$JSON" \
  -d '{"kind":"generate"}'

curl $API/migrations/$ID/preview -H "$KEY"

# 4 — approve, then pull the normalised rows back out
curl -X POST $API/migrations/$ID/runs -H "$KEY" -H "$JSON" \
  -d '{"kind":"execute"}'

curl -X POST $API/migrations/$ID/exports -H "$KEY" -H "$JSON" \
  -d '{"slugs":["customers","invoices"]}'

The Migration API runs the whole lifecycle over HTTP with an organisation-scoped key. The agent conversation can be streamed into your own UI, and the preview lets you check exactly what an import will produce before a single row is written.

Read the API reference

OpenFDA references

openFDA API documentation

Onboarding a customer off OpenFDA?

Bring a real OpenFDA export and we'll show you what lands in your product.

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