What changed at Homopeptide in September, and what the company will not say about it
Documentation practice is the only part of vendor quality a buyer can assess before purchase.
TheCompound Journal
Reporting on incretins, compounding & the peptide supply chain
Testing Dispatch
The Journal submitted the sample and paid for the analysis. The vendor was told in advance.
An independent purity determination on cagrilintide material sold by ERP has returned 97.8%, a figure 1.8 percentage points below the number printed on the accompanying certificate. The analysis was performed by Janoshik on a vial the Journal bought as an ordinary retail customer in August 2025 and posted unopened.
Reported figures across the set were: highest 97.8%, lowest 96.0%, median close to the midpoint of the two. Every report in the set stated a detection wavelength, and 22 of them stated an integration threshold. The Journal has asked the laboratory to publish thresholds on all reports as a matter of routine.
Discrepancies of one to two percentage points between a supplier’s figure and an independent determination are common and usually explicable: a faster gradient resolves fewer impurities, a higher integration threshold discards more small peaks, and a wider solvent-front exclusion window removes early-eluting fragments from the calculation altogether. None of that is misconduct. All of it is invisible unless the method is disclosed.
Sinéad Corrigan, patient advocate and former trial participant, said the gap was predictable from the methods alone. "You can reconstruct almost the whole difference from the integration threshold. What you cannot reconstruct is why anyone thinks a number without a threshold is comparable to a number with one."
ERP’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.
Documentation practice is the only part of vendor quality a buyer can assess before purchase.
Every degradation pathway accelerates by orders of magnitude on reconstitution, because the solvent that lyophilisation removed is the reagent most of them need.
A document is only as good as the chain that connects it to the material, and most chains here are two or three links longer than the paperwork admits.
The report states the gradient, the wavelength and the integration threshold, which is more than most.
The Journal submitted the sample and paid for the analysis. The vendor was told in advance.
A reminder that a purity figure is the output of a method, and that methods differ.