SF Trip: March 2026 - Part 2: Peptides

Have you ever had the thing that you know a lot about become the current thing? That’s happening now with “peptides”. Holy shit, I don’t know where to start. Pharma Basics Most people obsessed with peptides don’t know a few things: Peptides as pharmaceuticals have been around since the 1950s. A peptide is just a small protein. Peptides half extremely short half-lives, often on the order of seconds or minutes. So, if you’re saying you’re interested in peptides, you are saying: “I’m interested in biopharmaceuticals, but only drugs with very weak pharmacokinetics.” Drugs (of which peptides are a subgroup) usually have a specified target. There is an electrostatic interaction, usually hydrogen bonding, between the atoms of the drug and the atoms of the target (typically, but far from always, a receptor). If you can’t tell me what the target is and how the drug is binding to it, you do not have a drug. You have delusion. Next, drugs are tested rigorously, not only for safety reasons. Just identifying the pharmacokinetics of a substance (how it travels in the body) is arguably the most important starting point for any medicine. How is it metabolized? What is its half-life? Without this basic information you can’t even begin to have a medicine. You can start pharmacokinetics in animals and scale to humans. But, you also need a therapeutic hypothesis. This is a thoroughly vetted biological idea, considered a priori, as to why this medicine just might work. You very rarely discover these after the fact. Determining target engagement requires assays. What assay was your drug tested in? What did it show? Direct target engagement is very important to falsify your biological hypothesis. Preclinical studies are so manufactured and fraudulent in today’s day that I wouldn’t rely on them for biological hypotheses unless they are from an incredible lab, were done a priori, etc. Clinical reality is far harsher: without a double-blind placebo controlled study, there is often nothing to talk about. If I hear “but I know dozens of people…” one more time!!! Screw the FDA and pharma. Really? When most of the SF (and elsewhere) crowd talks about “peptides”, they’re not thinking octreotide, they’re thinking some random stuff that’s been thrown in animal models and is not FDA approved. Look, I’m not a softy—if there was a drug that could help me or my family, I’d find a way to get it. But I’m also not stupid and spent twenty years looking at pharmaceuticals. Drug companies like to make money. Drug companies love looking at random molecules and putting them in clinical trials. There are thousands of biopharmaceutical companies that are publicly traded. It is not hard to do a clinical trial from a university. 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. The FDA plays an important role. They make sure that whatever is on the label is actually in the drug. That’s why prescriptions are important. If I operated one of these research chemical shops (wildly illegal, I might add), I would just ship people alanine or something. No one would have any idea it wasn’t BPCBULLSHIT or whatever is popular right now. The other side of the argument “But Martin, there has to be some unapproved drug out there that is useful to take!” Yes, there are plenty. That is how I made a living. But it is not for you, world traveler, to think about this. The things you know do not apply to pharmaceuticals. It’s not that you’re not smart—I’m sure you are smarter than I—it just takes practice and time to understand medicine. I believe some places will even require you to go to school before you can decide who takes what drug. Just ask your doctor for medical advice. There’s a reason you don’t do surgery on yourself, fly a plane by yourself, etc. “But Martin, I want to optimize my health!” No. Stop it. You’re not sick. It’s all nonsense. Leave medicine to physicians. You do not know what you are doing. Become a physician if you are that interested. Or spend a lot of time and money on biopharma. I have zero doubt you’ll change your mind. There are no healthcare professionals that I know of who give a shit about these unapproved research chemicals. “But wahhhh”. There are actual dying people in the world. Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, PKAN, Lafora. Go fix those diseases. You’ll make someone and their family a lot happier than LARPing that you know medicine. This shit has to end.