What a split-sample exercise can establish, and what it cannot
Two years ago we ran an anonymised version of this comparison and promised a named one. This is it, with every method printed in full.
TheCompound Journal
Reporting on incretins, compounding & the peptide supply chain
Testing Dispatch
The result is unremarkable. What the report omits is not.
An independent purity determination on mazdutide material sold by Homopeptide has returned 98.6%, a figure 2.6 percentage points below the number printed on the accompanying certificate. The analysis was performed by PeptideMeter on a vial the Journal bought as an ordinary retail customer in July 2025 and posted unopened.
Reported figures across the set were: highest 98.6%, lowest 94.7%, median close to the midpoint of the two. Every report in the set stated a detection wavelength, and 8 of them stated an integration threshold. The Journal has asked the laboratory to publish thresholds on all reports as a matter of routine.
Reported figures across the set were: highest 98.6%, lowest 94.7%, median close to the midpoint of the two. Every report in the set stated a detection wavelength, and 8 of them stated an integration threshold. The Journal has asked the laboratory to publish thresholds on all reports as a matter of routine.
Four independent services — PeptideMeter, VendorInvestigate, and the two others operating in this market — carry the analytical burden for a trade that has no release-testing obligation of its own. Each is paid by whoever submits the sample, which is usually the vendor. The Journal’s position is that a submitter-pays model is workable but that its incentive structure has to be stated whenever a result is quoted as verification.
"The figure is not wrong and neither is theirs," said Alastair Renshaw, pharmaceutical supply-chain consultant. "They are answers to two different questions and the trade has decided to pretend there is only one question. Print the gradient and the argument disappears."
Homopeptide’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.
Two years ago we ran an anonymised version of this comparison and promised a named one. This is it, with every method printed in full.
Reported from the analysis, not from a warning notice.
Reversed-phase chromatography runs in an organic, acidic mobile phase that dissociates most non-covalent aggregates on the way to the detector.
The Journal submitted split samples from single lots to three assay services, under names unconnected to this publication, and published each method alongside each result.
The supplier has not disputed the finding. It has not explained the gap either.
A reminder that a purity figure is the output of a method, and that methods differ.