I"ll chime in on this test because I’m very familiar with it and this statement is incorrect. LC-MS will give you the intact mass of the peptide but not the sequence. Let’s say you have a peptide with 10 amino acids in it (a 10mer)…it would have a measured mass of ~1100 amu. However, those 10 amino acids could be in any sequence and still add up to 1100.
Why is this important? Those other sequences would not have the same biological effects that you desire in the peptide.
You can do sequencing of peptides with MS but it’s tricky, doesnt always work/give 100% of the sequence and is not the standard test that was listed (LC-MS). Edman degradation is still the gold standard for peptide sequencing.
I had some tested early on and they all exceeded the mfg’s COA’s. Since I deal directly with a mfg, not a 3rd party reseller, I know where my supply comes from and don’t do any additional testing.
Endo’s are not as big an issue as people think. Not that they not an issue, but their presence is exceedingly rare. If a batch is contaminated with endo’s people will know that within 5 minutes of injection, the response to that is near immediate and unmistakable. It’s not subtle at all. I’ve purchased peps from a variety of sources for market research and got 1 vial with endo’s and that was a wild and terrifying experience. Interestingly, that website disappeared a few weeks later.
TFA free is very common in the industry and I’ve never seen a positive test for TFA.
Dimerization can be an intended part of the process when making some peptides, it’s is used to increase potency (up or down) and half life of some peptides. If it’s a defect it can affect potency up or down, duration of effect up or down. If Dimerization was not planned for and were accidentally happening at the production stage it would be addressed then as the batch would be unsaleable.
Aggregation can cause some issues and extensive aggregation can be visible.
All peptide and wholesale sources have 1 thing that enables their business, reputation. One bad batch getting into the wild would end their business.
“Researchers” use social media constantly, more so than regular prescription drug users, and they are quite vocal about quality and results. I’ve only seen a few comments on sub-standard product and everyone then shuns that vendor.
“This peptide burns like hell”
→ almost always residual TFA, not the peptide itself.
I have taken a lot of injectable peptides from “mostly reliable” sources. I have never had an adverse reaction or irritation or burning at the site of injection, so I must assume that at least the residual TFA is not present at any significant amount.
There is never zero risk even from drugs manufactured by Pfizer, Lilly, etc.
There are NO deaths or hospitalizations from “contaminants” that I could find for peptides.
The worst case that I could find for gray market meds was a meningitis outbreak in 2015 for steroids produced by NECC (New England Compounding Center). And, anabolic steroids are not peptides.
Yeh, but the issue isn’t so binary. It would be rare that any contamination is so bad that it immediately causes death. I suspect most contamination issues are likely just negative hits on long-term health that only become evident much later.
Similar with nitrosamines (cancer causing agents) that are typically found in the batches of medications that get recalled due to the cheap/low quality pharmaceutical manufacturing processes that over-use solvents in the manufacturing process. You aren’t going to die immediately from a bad batch of medications with higher nitrosamines, but if you keep using these low quality batches you have higher risk of cancer.
The presence of nitrosamines (e.g., NDMA, NDEA) in pharmaceuticals is primarily a result of specific chemical side reactions that occur during manufacturing or storage. While these impurities can appear in any product, “low quality” or cost-cutting manufacturing practices significantly increase the probability of their formation due to less rigorous purification, testing, and process control.
Contaminated Recovered Solvents
High-quality manufacturing uses fresh, high-purity solvents. To cut costs, budget manufacturers often use recovered solvents (e.g., DMF, Toluene) purchased from third-party facilities.
The Risk: These facilities often mix solvents from different industrial processes. If a previous process used sodium nitrite (a common quenching agent for azides) and the solvent is not adequately purified, it introduces the nitrosating agent directly into the next drug batch.
Case Study: This was the primary root cause of the massive Valsartan recalls in 2018.
The presence of nitrosamines (N-nitrosamines) in pharmaceuticals poses a specific, quantifiable biological hazard: genotoxicity leading to carcinogenesis.
Unlike many other pharmaceutical impurities that might cause immediate allergic reactions or acute toxicity, nitrosamines are silent, long-term accumulators of genetic damage. The “exact risk” is a statistical probability of developing cancer after years of chronic exposure.
Why Avoidance is Critical
The biological rationale for strict avoidance is threefold:
No Safe Threshold: Current toxicological consensus treats genotoxic carcinogens as having no “safe” lower limit. Even microscopic amounts carry a theoretical probability of inducing a mutation.
Cumulative Burden: Humans are already exposed to nitrosamines through diet (cured meats, smoked fish, beer) and environment (tobacco smoke, water). Contaminated pharmaceuticals add a high-concentration, daily bolus to this existing “body burden,” potentially tipping the balance of the body’s DNA repair systems.
Silent Progression: Because the damage is cellular and microscopic, there are no warning symptoms (like nausea or rash) until a tumor develops years or decades later.
Wasn’t there something in Vegas awhile ago where they were had some “free love” type peptide injection festival landing a bunch of people in the hospital?
Yes… but I suspect most cases are not so obvious. If a person is sickened or dies many months or years after ongoing dosing, but takes many different things, there is enough plausible deniability for everyone (on the vendor side of things) to wipe their hands clean, and nobody knows for sure what happened.
I don’t want to be sensationalistic but I’m trying to find that delicate balance between understanding that there is risk in everything we do, but its important to understand and quantify those risks in rational ways, and to minimize those risks when we can.
A Las Vegas Festival Promised Ways to Cheat Death. Two Attendees Left Fighting for Their Lives.
There might not be enough of a signal for epidemiological studies to pick it up, i.e large enough of a niche for disease or deaths to pile up for researchers to pay attention, or it would take awhile. I’d rather wait.
I don’t understand how people can test their peptides. Even if their batch isn’t contaminated, why couldn’t their individual vials be? Clean water and needles is necessary as well.
A Las Vegas Festival Promised Ways to Cheat Death. Two Attendees Left Fighting for Their Lives.
They went to a Las Vegas conference this month that promised pathways to an “unlimited lifespan.” But at least two attendees left in ambulances and were hospitalized in critical condition, requiring ventilators to breathe.
The two women, who are recovering, fell ill after receiving peptide injections at a conference booth. The doctor who ran the booth was a Los Angeles physician specializing in “age reversal” therapies who did not have permission to practice medicine or dispense prescriptions in Nevada. Public health investigators are trying to determine if anyone else who attended the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival experienced a similar illness.
The investigation comes as peptides grow in popularity, thanks in part to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promotion of the amino acid chains as a way to fight aging and chronic disease. Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has vowed to end the Food and Drug Administration’s “war on peptides” and other alternative health therapies. Kent Holtorf, the doctor overseeing the booth where the women became ill, also has called for less regulation of alternative therapies and has criticized the FDA for blocking compounds he sees as lifesaving.
Holtorf told ProPublica he is cooperating with the investigation. “Of course, I want to get to the bottom of it. But almost assuredly it will come out that it was not the peptides.”
He said he became convinced the peptides weren’t the cause of the severe reactions after plugging everything he knows about the incident into an artificial intelligence app, which he said gave him a 57-page report that “basically says that it is impossible it was the peptides.” He refused to comment on what the report attributed the illnesses to.
“I don’t think it was the peptides, but I don’t want to try and push the blame and say it wasn’t us,” he said. “We are reassessing everything we are doing.”
At this time I can’t find any evidence that it was the peptides.
FYI: Going to any festival in Las Vegas, is risky business. The town is full of questionable types that will do you harm if given the chance.
Vendors won’t provide more than mass or purity. And of course, the notion of accepting test results from vendors completely runs against your desire for safety, since you cannot verify that what they sent for testing is what they sent you. So it makes no sense to ask for them.
I’ve compiled all endotoxin test results I could find over the last 12 months. I found around 70. Average endotoxin levels over the last 12 months was found to be between 1 and 69 EU for an entire vial. The FDA limit is 5 eu/kg for a single dose (not an entire vial) .
Out of dozens of heavy metal tests I’ve seen , exactly 0 have failed. Same for TFA. These are less tested because they’re known not to be an issue.
If you’re going to run all these tests, it’s a good idea to to buy more than 1 kit to make it worthwhile.
I’m just saying what he said. That’s what he meant. It wasn’t the peptides per se. This has been a discussion about harms of contaminants, not peptides…
True… but if there is a reputable (Chinese or other?) supplier out there they should be doing these tests (IMHO), and sending the consumer the test results, then when the consumer or middleman gets the product and repeats the test (and hopefully the are identical results), over time you build credibility and trust between the supplier and the consumer and perhaps you don’t need to test every batch. It just seems that given that most suppliers/vendors are not doing these tests and providing them on each batch, that they likely have something to hide (or just don’t care).
Have you done any testing on TFA/Solvents levels on batches you’ve gotten? What were the results?
Gold Standard:
TFA Content: <1% (Ideal) or <0.5% (Pharma Grade).
Acetate Content: Should be the primary salt (typically 10–15% by weight).
Red Flag: >5% TFA. (Grey market peptides often test at 30–40% TFA, which causes injection site inflammation).
This is how you think, or you wish it would work, but this is not how it works. Your wish for a more transparent pipeline is actually what would kill this gray/black market.
You’ll find many vendors that test each batch and have great reputations, but that still run into issues because of mixups either in the lab, or in logistics. All of these mixups were caught by customer testing.
Or course if you find a vendor that you feel you can trust, nothing stops you from buying from building a relationship with them and buying from them without testing.
Not all, some. Result for all of them was "not detected "
I appreciate RapAdmin’s efforts here, and I concede his obvious point that peptides are not risk free. However, it has been my experience that the benefits far outweigh the risks. I love to run, and peptides keep me going. In a very real sense, they help me outrun death.