Vol. 3, No. 6 — June 2026Independent since 2024

TheCompound Journal

Reporting on incretins, compounding & the peptide supply chain

A monthly journal of record.
30 issues · 32 contributors
Not medical advice. We sell nothing.

Testing Dispatch

Janoshik result on a Hangzhou retatrutide lot lands 0.8 points below the supplier’s figure

The supplier has not disputed the finding. It has not explained the gap either.

A peptide content determination commissioned by the Journal on a 10 mg retatrutide vial from Homopeptide has returned 85% of the labelled mass. Chromatographic purity on the same vial was above 96.6%. The two numbers measure different things and only one of them was on the certificate.

Content by elemental nitrogen determination returned 85% of the labelled nominal mass, which on a 10 mg vial corresponds to roughly 12.63 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.

Content by elemental nitrogen determination returned 85% of the labelled nominal mass, which on a 10 mg vial corresponds to roughly 12.63 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 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.

Rowena Ashcombe, community pharmacist and diabetes educator, 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 date of the request for comment. The dossier’s "what we could not verify" box records the questions still outstanding.

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