Hi {{first name | there}},
My birthday is this weekend. I spent part of Friday listening to an FDA committee vote on peptides, because apparently this is who I am now 😆.
More seriously, birthdays make me reflective. I am genuinely grateful for everything I have learned from this community of experts, and especially from my patients, who keep making me a better doctor.
For this next year, I have three non-work goals:
Lean into embodied fun. Learn to dance, act, and do more things that get me out of my head and into the experience.
Make more time for friends, old and new.
Be a little less of a perfectionist and lean into spontaneity. That may surprise the people who already think I have been plenty spontaneous!
I have not signed up for dance class yet. I did, however, spend Friday on an FDA webcast. So: peptides.
By the end, six of seven peptide families had received a favorable recommendation. For the past year, I have been the person telling people that BPC-157 has more animal data than human data, that TB-500 borrows evidence from a related molecule, and that Epitalon's telomere story is nowhere near a serious longevity claim.
This is all still true.
Even so, I was glad. People already injecting these products should be able to go through a prescriber and a licensed pharmacy instead of a research-chemical website. Now FDA, pharmacies, and clinicians have to make that option safer than the gray market existing today.
The Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee recommended both the free-base and acetate forms of BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, MOTS-c, Epitalon, and Semax for possible inclusion on the 503A Bulks List. Emideltide, also called DSIP, was the only peptide that lost. I put the full tally here.
This recommendation is still only advisory. No peptide was approved by the FDA, no pharmacy got new permissions, and nothing became newly available on Friday.
However, you can expect some interesting developments over the next few months...
