What did KLOW do for you?
Hard to tell to be honest. I don’t really know how to measure its effectiveness. I did recover quickly from a shoulder arthroscopic clean up last year
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Is the peptide craze backed by science? The promise behind the hype
Scarce science
Cohen began to get excited about peptides a couple of decades ago. He and his team had started mining mitochondrial DNA for peptide-encoding genes and synthesizing the molecules to study their function. One of their finds was MOTS-c.
In mice, the compound prevented obesity and insulin resistance and improved physical performance1. It even extended lifespan. It worked so well that CohBar, a company co-founded by Cohen and Nir Barzilai at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, licensed the MOTS-c patent. CohBar tweaked the compound to make it more effective and more stable, and then, in 2018, tested it in a safety study.
Researchers first administered the compound to 65 healthy adults to determine dosing. They then randomized 20 people with obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and gave the compound to about half of them for four weeks. Participants who received the peptide had lower glucose levels, greater reductions in markers of liver injury and a trend towards weight loss compared with the placebo group2.
CohBar raised US$80 million to get the drug through an initial trial. But, says Cohen, “we couldn’t raise the next round to do a phase II”. In 2023, the company shut down. That hasn’t stopped MOTS-c from becoming one of the most popular unapproved peptides. “Guys it’s like you have unlimited energy,” raves one Instagram user.
Other popular unlicensed peptides have been studied in even fewer people. Flynn McGuire, a physician specializing in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and his colleagues delved into the literature on BPC-157, a peptide that purportedly helps to repair tissue injuries3. They managed to dig up 3 pilot studies with a total of 30 participants. “The amount of human data that exists for it is of dubious enough quality that you can essentially just ignore it,” he says. “There are no long-term studies. There are no safety studies, even in animals.”
Shepherding a drug from the lab through clinical trials is enormously expensive. And pharmaceutical companies might not want to invest in a compound that is already readily available. Kaeberlein says that he suspects that many of these peptides simply don’t work well enough to grab the interest of pharmaceutical companies. “They have biological activity, and they may have benefits in certain indications for certain people,” he says. But “none of them are as effective as the GLP drugs. If they were, pharma would have developed them already”.
full article: Is the peptide craze backed by science? The promise behind the hype (Nature)
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Nothing new here. Aside from the GLP1s and amylin agonists, you can count on 2 hands the number of peptides that have phase 3 data behind them. Use at your own risk tolerance.
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make that one hand or 1/2 a hand LOL