The ionisation line on a report is the most informative line on it
The ionisation method determines the charge states you see, the adducts you must account for, and the modifications you might destroy in the process.
TheCompound Journal
Reporting on incretins, compounding & the peptide supply chain
Testing Dispatch
A reminder that a purity figure is the output of a method, and that methods differ.
A peptide content determination commissioned by the Journal on a 30 mg orforglipron vial from JEEP has returned 92% of the labelled mass. Chromatographic purity on the same vial was above 95.5%. The two numbers measure different things and only one of them was on the certificate.
Content by elemental nitrogen determination returned 92% of the labelled nominal mass, which on a 30 mg vial corresponds to roughly 10.40 mg of peptide rather than the labelled figure. The remainder is accounted for by counter-ion, residual water and residual solvent, none of which is visible chromatographically.
The Journal purchased 3300 vials from the same lot and had 20 of them analysed separately, in order to distinguish vial-to-vial variation from method variation. Vial-to-vial agreement was within 0.4 percentage points. Method-to-method disagreement was an order of magnitude larger.
The wider context is that material sold for research use carries no regulatory release specification in any jurisdiction the Journal has examined. A certificate is a commercial document, not a compliance one, and its content is whatever the issuer chooses to put on it. That is the gap independent testing fills, and it fills it imperfectly.
Lorcan Feeney, analytical services director at an independent laboratory, was more cautious. "One lot tells you about one lot. I would not draw a conclusion about a company from a single determination, and I would not let a company draw one either."
JEEP’s dossier has been updated with this determination and with the date of the request for comment. The dossier’s "what we could not verify" box records the questions still outstanding.
The ionisation method determines the charge states you see, the adducts you must account for, and the modifications you might destroy in the process.
A reminder that a purity figure is the output of a method, and that methods differ.
A shallow gradient resolves impurities that a steep one runs into the parent peak. Both methods are legitimate; only one of them can see the small stuff.
The result is unremarkable. What the report omits is not.
Stereochemical inversion changes the molecule, changes its biology, and changes its mass by exactly nothing.
The limit for a parenteral product is calculable from the dose and the body weight in two lines. Almost nobody in this trade performs the calculation.