There’s a post circulating from a biopharma veteran, Martin Shkreli that makes the strongest version of the establishment case against peptides.
Martin is sharp and his article is well-written, informed by real industry experience, and contains several points that are genuinely correct.
But I think it misses where this space is heading, and reveals more about the limits of the pharmaceutical worldview than about the limits of peptides.
I want to take his arguments seriously because finding truth requires debate. If the peptide thesis can’t withstand scrutiny, it’s not worth holding. So let’s see.
Where he’s right
- Most people in the peptide community have a shallow understanding of pharmacology. The average person buying BPC-157 from a research chemical site would struggle to tell you its target, its binding kinetics, its metabolic pathway, or its half-life in humans.
- Purity and quality control are serious issues. If you’re buying from an unregulated vendor, you genuinely might be injecting alanine, or worse. Third-party testing has shown peptide purity ranging from 30% to 99%+ across vendors, which is a real concern.
- Pre-clinical data is weaker than most people think. The replication crisis in preclinical research is well-documented. Most animal studies, across all of biomedicine, fail to replicate or translate to humans. This isn’t specific to peptides but is a systemic problem in bio.
These are valid points. Anyone in the peptide space who dismisses them is not being serious.
Despite this, let me explain why I still hold the opposite view to Martin.
“Just a small protein” misses the point
Martin says: “A peptide is just a small protein.” This is as true as saying “a semiconductor is just silicon” but isn’t helpful in characterizing what makes peptides interesting at this point in time.
What makes peptides interesting is that they are endogenous signaling molecules **and our body naturally produces over 7,000 of them to regulate every major biological system.
This distinction matters for 3 reasons:
1. Safety profile
Endogenous molecules have fundamentally different risk profiles than xenobiotic drugs.
Your body has evolved mechanisms to produce, use, and clear these molecules. The toxicological starting point for an endogenous peptide is categorically different from a novel synthetic compound. This doesn’t mean they’re risk-free (they certainly aren’t!) but the framing of peptides as equivalent to random unproven small molecules is inaccurate.
2. Target specificity
Martin’s claim that “peptides lack identified targets” is false for many peptides. Even when it’s true, the answer shouldn’t be “let’s ignore” but rather “let’s research”.
Several peptides have known targets.
- GLP-1 receptor agonists bind the GLP-1 receptor
- Thymosin Alpha-1 modulates Th1/Th2 balance through toll-like receptor signaling
- PT-141 acts on melanocortin-4 receptors in the hypothalamus
Others certainly need more research.
BPC-157’s mechanism is complex – it appears to modulate the nitric oxide system and upregulate growth factor receptors including VEGFR2, but we don’t understand it well enough yet. Further research can help our understanding.
3. Evolutionary optimization
Peptide molecules have been optimized by natural selection over hundreds of millions of years for specific signaling functions. The idea that we have nothing to learn from the body’s own peptide production — that only synthetic molecules that have passed through the FDA pipeline deserve attention — reflects a limitation to pharma dogma.
The half-life argument is overstated
Martin argues that peptides have “extremely short half-lives, often on the order of seconds or minutes,” and that this makes them pharmacologically weak.
This is a genuine challenge in peptide therapeutics, and it’s one the field takes seriously; but there are several problems with this argument:
First, not all peptides have seconds-long half-lives. Semaglutide (Ozempic) has a half-life of approximately 7 days. How? Pharmaceutical engineering. Fatty acid acylation that enables albumin binding, dramatically extending circulation time. I do concede that some peptides have a short half-life, but even then, that (a) Often doesn’t matter, (b) Is changing, (c) Can be a feature not a bug of peptides.
Second, a short half-life doesn’t mean no useful effect. Sermorelin has a short half-life but triggers a downstream physiological response, which is why it was FDA approved. Thymosin-alpha 1 also has a short half-life but is approved in drugs in 35 countries because that brief exposure is still enough to modulate immune signalling. The lesson here is that pharmacokinetics are not the same thing as utility. A peptide does not need a multi-day half-life to matter. It needs to reach the target, engage the pathway, and trigger an effect that meaningfully outlasts its time in circulation.
Third, half-life modification is an active and rapidly advancing field. PEGylation, lipidation, cyclization, D-amino acid substitution, stapled peptides are increasingly proven strategies for extending peptide half-lives from minutes to hours or days.
Fourth, short half-life is sometimes a feature, not a bug. A signaling molecule with a short half-life provides tight temporal control. It acts and clears quickly, reducing the window for off-target effects. For certain applications — acute injury repair, pulsatile hormone signaling, immune modulation — a short-acting molecule may be pharmacologically preferable.
The half-life challenge is real but is also being systematically overcome. Citing it as a reason to dismiss a category is like citing the low energy density of early batteries as a reason to dismiss electric vehicles in 2015.
“If your drug has never been tested, there’s a reason” is the weakest argument
The article’s most rhetorically effective argument is also the most logically flawed:
“Drug companies love looking at random molecules and putting them in clinical trials. If your ‘drug’ has never been tested, there is a reason. The reason is not that you are a biopharmaceutical genius who has found something cool that everyone else missed.”
This assumes that the pharmaceutical industry is an efficient market — that everything worth testing gets tested, and everything untested is untested because it was evaluated and rejected.
This is demonstrably false, and anyone with experience in pharma almost certainly knows it.
Before there is research there is hypothesis:
- Antibiotics were dismissed. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was untrusted and ignored for years.
- Ketamine was once “just an anesthetic”. Yet, Martin played a role in helping it become one of the most important breakthroughs in depression treatment.
- mRNA was once impractical. Too unstable. Too immunogenic. Too hard to deliver. Now it is a validated drug platform with approved vaccines and expanding therapeutic use.
So, why haven’t peptides been researched?
- Patent problem. Many peptides cannot be patented, therefore pharma doesn’t have the commercial incentive.
- Injection problem. Injections were not previously thought to have a large enough TAM. This has changed now that roughly 1 in 5 Americans has tried a GLP-1.
- Wellness problem. Drugs classically were about targeting disease. Increasingly we are seeing drugs being used for ‘enhancement’. Many take GLP-1s, skin care drugs, hair loss drugs, viagra, or beta blockers for these reasons.
For example, Thymosin-alpha 1 is approved as a pharmaceutical in over 35 countries and is not FDA approved in the US because no company has been willing to fund the approval pathway. It has been studied in hundreds of clinical trials for hepatitis B, hepatitis C, cancer immunotherapy, and vaccine adjuvant use. It has a well-characterized mechanism of action, well-understood pharmacokinetics, and decades of clinical use.
The “you’re not sick, leave medicine to physicians” misunderstands sickness
“You’re not sick. It’s all nonsense. Leave medicine to physicians.”
Medicine today has a fundamental flaw: we treat sick vs well as a binary spectrum. We use ‘normal’ to mean within the range of 95% of the entire population. And as a result, we do not intervene early enough. We react too late, when things are severe.
My position is that you shouldn’t wait until you’re diagnosably sick before intervening. That’s negligent medicine. It’s the medical equivalent of telling someone not to fix the crack in their foundation until the house collapses.
For example, a 45-year-old with declining growth hormone, rising inflammatory markers, worsening insulin sensitivity, and thinning bone density is not “sick” by current diagnostic standards. All of their markers are “normal for age.” But that’s not optimal. Intervening early could alter their life.
Additionally, millions now already take peptide-based drugs, GLP-1s, not because they have a diagnosed disease but because they want to optimize their health. Many of them are not diabetic. Many of them are not clinically obese. They are people who looked at their trajectory and decided to intervene early. The medical establishment initially resisted this but now touts that this might be a holy grail.
Finally, the “leave it to physicians” model assumes physicians are keeping up. They are not. Physicians lag the research by 15-20 years. Most doctors dismissed the genome and microbiome for decades. Many still don’t understand the mechanism of action of GLP-1s. Science is outpacing medical education.
It comes down to this
A common way we limit human progress is by assuming that the current way is the best way. However, the history of humanity shows that this is never the case. Our human imperative is to improve, to innovate, to create, to question and to push things forward for the better.
Today, many have assumed that the current pharmaceutical system, with all its muddied incentives, is the best pathway forward and that if it hasn’t researched certain peptides they must not work.
My view instead is that this is a defining moment in human history, where we are upgrading what it means to study the human body, commercialize drugs for wellness, intervene early, and inform people to make risk-reward decisions.
The peptide movement is messy, undereducated in places, and occasionally reckless. It is also directionally correct about something important: that the body’s own molecular toolkit is underexplored.
The next chapter of human health doesn’t come from close-minded consensus-seeking. It comes from open-minded truth-seeking. And we intend to do just that. We’ll map this space through exploration and evidence, running controlled experiments, interrogating every claim, and separating data from dogma.
This is what pushes humanity forward.