What changed at SGN in January, and what the company says prompted 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 result is unremarkable. What the report states alongside it is not.
An independent purity determination on semaglutide material sold by Homopeptide has returned 96.0%, a figure 3.1 percentage points above the number printed on the accompanying certificate, which the supplier had reported against a shorter gradient and a tighter threshold. The analysis was performed by VendorInvestigate on a vial the Journal bought as an ordinary retail customer in June 2026 and posted unopened.
The Journal purchased 20 vials from the same lot at retail and had four 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.
Purity became this trade’s single figure of merit because it is the cheapest measurement to obtain and the easiest to compare. Peptide content, which determines how much drug is actually in a vial, costs several times as much and is quoted as a priced addition by most of the twenty companies in the Journal’s dossier programme rather than carried as a standard release test. Sterility and endotoxin are separate disciplines again, and are neither tested nor claimed.
Dr Sirichai Boonmee, peptide chemist, Chulalongkorn University, 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."
Homopeptide’s dossier has been updated with this determination and with the company’s response to it. The dossier’s ordering box records the lead times, the minimum quantities and what a buyer should ask for at the point of order.
Documentation practice is the only part of vendor quality a buyer can assess before purchase.
Reported from the analysis, not from a warning notice.
The interval between manufacture and analysis is the most under-read figure on the page, and the one most likely to matter by the time a vial is opened.
What happens to traceability when bulk material is subdivided, repackaged and relabelled two or three times before sale.
A reminder that a purity figure is the output of a method, and that methods differ.
The masking phenomenon known as low endotoxin recovery means a formulation can return a clean result while containing endotoxin the assay cannot see.