Twelve minutes or forty: what gradient slope buys
We set out the parameters a method disclosure would contain, all of which are known to whoever ran the sample and none of which is commercially sensitive.
Explainers in 2024
Page 3 of 5 of this archive, newest first.
What competing on one number does to a market
A market that competes on one measurement will optimise that measurement. There are legitimate ways to raise a purity figure that involve no change to the product at all.
The limits of mechanism: why receptor data will not tell you who responds
A catalogue of open questions, with an assessment of how likely each is to be resolved.
Pass, conform, comply: three words for three different claims
Statements of conformity are supposed to rest on a stated decision rule. Almost nothing in this trade states one.
The mechanism behind the mechanism
What scintigraphy and breath-test studies established about emptying rate, and what they did not.
The half-life question, answered properly
What the pharmacokinetic data supports about dose timing, missed doses and interruption.
A schedule that bends does not break
Nausea and gastric delay attenuate over weeks at an unchanged dose. That single physiological fact is the entire justification for holding.
What “LC-MS: conforms” tells a reader, which is almost nothing
The regulated world states the method, the instrument, the convention and the tolerance. This market states a verdict.
The qualification chain nobody in this trade can show you
Accreditation to the international competence standard covers the scope a laboratory has been assessed for, which is not necessarily the test you commissioned.
How a correct calculation becomes a wrong dose
We have catalogued what readers report, ranked by the size of the dosing error each produces.
The anatomy of the most reproduced page in this trade
The purity figure is the least informative line on a well-constructed certificate and the only line most buyers read.
Pancreatitis, obstruction, gallbladder: three things nausea can be
The features that should prompt urgent assessment, stated once and plainly.
What the trials adjudicated, and how
We give background rates alongside trial rates, because an event occurring during treatment is not thereby caused by it.
One receptor, several signals: the case for reading retatrutide as a biased agonist
What the in-vitro data supports, what it does not, and where the extrapolation to a person begins.
Quadrupole, time-of-flight, orbital trap: what each class can and cannot see
Parts per million sound impressive until they are converted into daltons at the molecular weight of the thing being measured.
The effect profile, predicted from an expression map
The receptor populations that produce satiety and the ones that produce nausea overlap substantially. That is why the ceiling of this drug class is where it is, and it is…
Units, millilitres, milligrams: three scales on one small object
Insulin syringes are graduated in units on a convention that fixes 100 units to one millilitre. That convention says nothing about how much peptide is in a unit, and…
What a mass spectrometer does to a peptide before it measures anything
The ionisation method determines the charge states you see, the adducts you must account for, and the modifications you might destroy in the process.
Gauge, pain and flow rate
Gauge affects pain and flow rate rather than depth. A finer needle is more comfortable and slower, and with a viscous solution the difference is noticeable.
Five things a purity figure cannot tell you
Aggregates dissociate in the mobile phase and are recorded as monomer. Only a size-based separation reports them.