Check the vial, not the box

Peptides degrade. Lyophilised material stored cold and dry degrades slowly, and the rate depends on the sequence, the residual water content, the container closure and the temperature history. A certificate stating 99.1% purity is a statement about the day of analysis, and nothing on the page carries a claim about the day of opening. This is not a defect in the document; it is the nature of a snapshot. It becomes a defect when the snapshot is presented as a property of the product.

A certificate is a document, not a test

The confusion at the root of almost every dispute about certificates is a category error. A certificate of analysis is not a measurement. It is a record asserting that measurements were made, by named methods, on identified material, on a stated date, with stated outcomes, and that somebody reviewed and released the batch on that basis. The measurements exist elsewhere: in instrument data files, in analyst notebooks, in a laboratory information system. The certificate is the summary that travels with the goods.

This distinction has a practical consequence. When the Journal wants to know whether a purity figure is sound, we do not scrutinise the certificate; we ask for the underlying laboratory report and, where possible, the chromatogram. The certificate can only tell us what somebody concluded. The chromatogram tells us what the instrument saw, and the two are separated by decisions about integration, thresholds and reporting that the certificate does not record.

It follows that a certificate’s value is almost entirely a function of whether it can be traced back to that underlying evidence. A document with a batch number, a date, a named method and a named analyst is checkable in principle even if nobody ever checks it. A document with a percentage and a logo is not checkable by anyone, including the company that issued it, and the difference between those two situations is invisible to a buyer who reads only the number.

The header block: identifying the object

The top of a certificate answers the question, what is this document about. A complete header names the product, gives a catalogue or item number, gives the batch or lot number, states the quantity or fill weight, names the manufacturer and the site, and identifies the customer or order where applicable. Some add a chemical name, a sequence in single-letter code, a molecular formula and a molecular weight, all of which are useful because they let a reader check the theoretical values used elsewhere on the page.

The sequence in particular is worth insisting on. A certificate that prints the one-letter sequence has given a reader the means to calculate the expected mass independently, and therefore to check the identity line. Two of the twenty companies in the Journal’s dossier programme do this as standard. It costs nothing and it converts one line of the document from an assertion into a verifiable claim.

What a header should never do is identify the product only by a trade name. A vial described as a proprietary blend with no chemical identity, no formula and no sequence cannot be checked against anything, and a certificate for such a product is a document about a name. This is a documentary observation rather than an accusation, and the remedy is trivial: print the sequence.

What a batch number is supposed to mean

A batch, or lot, is a defined quantity of material produced in a single process run or a defined series of runs, homogeneous within itself, and identified by a unique code. That definition does real work: it is what makes it meaningful to test a sample and draw conclusions about the whole. If the material identified by one code is not homogeneous — if it was blended from separate syntheses, or filled across several sessions from stock stored differently — then a result on one sample generalises less well than the certificate implies.

In this trade batch codes range from the highly informative to the arbitrary. A code encoding the year, the month, the product and a sequence number tells a reader something and can be checked for internal consistency across documents. A four-digit code with no discernible structure cannot. Neither format is wrong; the difference is whether a reader can detect an anomaly.

The Journal’s dossier programme asks each company how batch codes are constructed and whether one code corresponds to one synthesis, one fill, or one shipment. The answers vary considerably and several companies have not previously been asked. We publish the answers without comment, because a code that identifies a fill session rather than a synthesis is a perfectly reasonable convention as long as a reader knows which convention is in use.

Check the vial, not the box

The single most common documentary failure the Journal encounters is a batch number on the certificate that does not appear on the vial. The variants are instructive. Sometimes the number is on the outer carton and not the vial, which means the connection between document and material depends on the carton having been packed correctly. Sometimes the vial carries a different number entirely, and the certificate corresponds to an earlier lot. Sometimes the vial carries no number at all, in which case the certificate cannot be attached to it by any means.

These situations are not equivalent and none of them is, on its own, evidence of misconduct. Subdivision and repackaging generate new identifiers legitimately, and a reseller filling vials from bulk may reasonably supply the synthesis house’s certificate for the bulk material while assigning its own fill lot. What is not reasonable is leaving the reader to guess which object the document describes, because that guess is exactly what a certificate exists to remove.

The remedy is a single line: a statement of the relationship between the certificate’s lot and the vial’s lot. “Filled from bulk lot X as fill lot Y on date Z” is eleven words and resolves the entire question. Three of the twenty companies in our programme now print something to this effect, two of them after we asked.

Three dates, and the conventions behind them

Date of manufacture is when the material was made. Date of analysis is when the reported tests were performed. Retest date is the date by which the material should be re-examined if it is to continue to be used, and expiry date is the date after which it should not be used at all. The last two rest on different evidence: an expiry date implies stability data supporting the claim over that period, while a retest date implies a policy of re-examination in the absence of such data.

In this market the two are used interchangeably, and the substitution matters. A vial marked with a two-year expiry, where no stability study exists, is carrying a claim its documentation cannot support. The same vial marked with a two-year retest date is carrying a much weaker and entirely defensible statement: we have not established shelf life, so look again by this date. The second is honest and the first is not, and the difference is one word.

What follows for a reader is a specific question to ask: on what basis. A supplier that can point to real-time or accelerated stability data for the sequence in question has something. A supplier that assigned twenty-four months because that is what the form said has something else, and the international framework for setting such limits is explicit about the evidence required.¹

The certificate is a snapshot, and the vial has aged

Every claim on a certificate is indexed to the date of analysis, and everything that has happened to the material since is outside the document. For lyophilised peptides stored cold, dry and dark, the rate of change is slow but not zero: deamidation proceeds even in the solid state at a rate that depends on residual water, oxidation proceeds in the presence of air and light, and aggregation can occur after a temperature excursion that leaves no other trace.²

The practical significance depends on the interval. A certificate dated three weeks before shipment describes material that is, for most purposes, the material in the vial. A certificate dated fourteen months before shipment describes an earlier object. The Journal’s audit of certificates supplied through the dossier programme found a median interval between manufacture and analysis of eleven days, which is reassuring, and a median interval between analysis and the customer receiving the vial of somewhat over four months, which is the number nobody reports.

None of this argues for retesting every vial. It argues for reading the date, which takes two seconds, and for treating purity figures as historical rather than current. It also argues for taking the appearance line seriously, since a change in the cake is one of the few observations a buyer can make that bears on what has happened since the document was written.

Six tells, in order of speed

First, the batch number. Does it appear on the vial, and does it increment sensibly against other documents from the same source? Second, the dates. Do the date of manufacture and the date of analysis differ between documents that describe different batches? Identical dates across supposedly distinct lots is the strongest single signal available from the page.

Third, the chromatogram. If two documents carry visually identical traces, they carry the same injection: no two real runs produce identical baselines. Fourth, the numbers themselves. Purity figures repeated to two decimal places across batches are implausible; real process variation shows up in the first decimal. Fifth, the signature. Is a name present, and does the signature vary across documents or is it the same raster image? Sixth, internal arithmetic. Do the stated molecular weight and sequence agree with each other, and does the stated mass convention match the value given?

The sixth is the most satisfying because it requires no comparison document. A certificate printing a sequence, a formula and a molecular weight contains enough to check itself, and a mismatch between them is a documentary error that has nothing to do with the material. The Journal has found three such mismatches in the last two years, all three of which turned out to be transcription errors that the companies concerned corrected within a week of being asked.

The certificate as a file

A certificate that arrives as a PDF is a file with properties, and those properties are frequently more informative than the page. The document metadata usually records the producing application: chromatography data systems, laboratory information management systems, word processors and web-based form tools all leave distinguishable signatures. Creation and modification timestamps are often present. The original filename sometimes survives in the title field, and it occasionally names a different product or lot than the page does.

Structural properties help too. A page whose text can be selected and searched was generated as text; a page that is a single raster image was scanned or screenshotted, which destroys the metadata trail and is worth noticing when a supplier has the ability to send the original. Embedded font lists distinguish documents produced on different systems. A chromatogram present as vector graphics came from the instrument software; the same chromatogram as a low-resolution bitmap has been through a screenshot at some point.

None of this is proof of anything and it should not be presented as such. It is evidence about how a document came to exist, which the content of the page cannot supply. The Journal records these observations, asks the company about them, and publishes the exchange. Where a supplier responds by sending the original instrument-generated report, the question usually resolves immediately and in the supplier’s favour, which is worth saying because it happens more often than the alternative.

Accreditation, and the scope nobody checks

An accreditation logo on a letterhead means a body has assessed a laboratory against the international standard for testing competence and granted accreditation for a defined scope of methods. The scope is the part that matters and it is published: accreditation bodies maintain public registers listing, for each accredited laboratory, the tests and techniques covered. A laboratory can be validly accredited and the specific test on your certificate can lie outside its schedule.

Checking this takes a few minutes. Find the accreditation number on the document, look it up on the relevant national body’s register, and read the scope. What you are looking for is whether the technique used for your test — reversed-phase HPLC purity, mass spectrometric identity, water determination — appears. Where it does, the accreditation is doing work. Where it does not, the logo is a true statement about the laboratory and says nothing about the test in front of you.

The standard itself is clear that reports must identify what was and was not covered, and that accredited status attaches to activities rather than to organisations as a whole.³ The Journal makes this check on any certificate it intends to cite, and reports the result. It is the single most under-performed piece of due diligence in this market, principally because almost nobody knows the registers exist.

How this publication handles certificates

Four rules, arrived at over two years and revised twice. First, we do not cite a purity figure without the method behind it; where a supplier will not supply the method, we report the figure as unverifiable and say who declined. Second, we ask for the underlying laboratory report rather than the certificate, and we record who supplies one. Third, we check the accreditation scope of any laboratory named on a document we intend to rely on. Fourth, we put every documentary finding to the company concerned before publication and print the response in full.

The fourth rule is the one that has changed our coverage most. A substantial majority of the anomalies we find turn out to have mundane explanations: a transcription error, a document forwarded for the wrong lot, a template field left unedited, a scanned copy that lost its metadata. Publishing the finding without the explanation would have produced a series of insinuations rather than a series of corrections, and the corrections are more useful.

The rules also mean we publish less than we could. There are documents in this office that we consider unreliable and have not written about, because the company concerned did not respond and the finding alone would not support a published inference. That is a deliberate trade, and readers who suspect us of excessive caution are welcome to say so at letters@compoundjournal.com, where several already have.

A necessary distinction between a bad document and a bad product

Almost nothing in this article supports an inference about the contents of a vial. A certificate missing a specification column, an unsigned footer, a stale date of analysis and a batch number that appears only on the carton is a poor document. The material it accompanies may be excellent, and in the Journal’s experience frequently is: the analytical work behind these products is often better than the paperwork that reports it, because the paperwork is produced by a commercial function and the analysis by a laboratory.

The reverse also holds. A beautifully constructed certificate with four columns, two signatures and a named method is evidence of a functioning documentary process and is not evidence about the vial either, since a document cannot testify to material it does not accompany. This is why the Journal reports documents as documents and material as material, and declines to convert one into a claim about the other.

We labour the point because the alternative is a genre of coverage that treats documentary weakness as proof of dishonesty, and that genre is both unfair and useless. Unfair because most documentary weakness in this trade is inherited convention rather than intent. Useless because it gives a reader nothing to do. Reading the document properly gives a reader something to do, which is the entire purpose of this piece.

The next piece in this department turns from the document to the institutions that generate it: the four independent testing services this market relies on, what each measures, and the awkward fact that in most cases the party paying for the test is the party being tested. Two of the four advertise in this publication, which is disclosed on our funding page and is stated again wherever the coverage touches them.