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- [00:00]
Biohacker/Tech Worker
Other people, when they shoot up drugs, they are going for the opioid highs. And in San Francisco, they want to be cognitive maxing.
- [00:08]
Aaron Kesselheim
The FDA is our, you know, most important public health agency and maybe in the world, and we really need it to be operating at maximal capacity with, with the resources that it needs and to be, you know, operating based on optimal scientific rigor. And, you know, unfortunately, I don't think it's doing that in the last year.
- [00:31]
Hamilton Morris
There was a big New York Times story recently about so called Chinese peptides, but it is so vague as a term that it's borderline. Like asking someone, what are your thoughts on molecules?
- [00:43]
Lily Ottinger
Welcome to the world of Chinese peptides, where American consumers inject themselves with research chemicals in pursuit of weight loss, muscle recovery, and the elusive promise of optimization. Today on ChinaTalk, we're trying out a new podcast format to investigate the explosive rise of gray market peptides and the Chinese pharmaceutical ecosystem that turned this biohacking trend into a market worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We usually do this kind of open source investigative journalism on Substack. This show is an experiment in converting that type of content to a podcast format. So please let us know if you want more episodes like this. I'm your host, Lily Ottinger. Let's get started.
- [01:19]
Biohacker/Tech Worker
And people are getting so into this trend in Silicon Valley that they are even hosting parties, peptide raves, for example, that are sponsored by suppliers where they will teach you first how to mix and inject your own peptides and then throw a rave with like loud techno and ochem structures projected on, projected behind the dj. So I went to one in December just to check out the underground peptide scene. And it was actually, it was pretty fun. It was really just like a party with a high school chemistry lab beforehand.
- [01:48]
Lily Ottinger
That was Jasmine sun, author of the New York Times article about peptides that inspired this podcast. Before we go further, we need to understand what we're actually talking about when we say Chinese peptides. We talked to Hamilton Morris, the science journalist and chemist known for his Vice series on psychoactive drugs, and learned that the word peptide is almost meaninglessly broad.
- [02:08]
Hamilton Morris
A peptide is just like a string of amino acids that is more than two amino acids joined together and less than 50, at which point it becomes a polypeptide. But within that umbrella, you have a borderline infinite number of potential pharmacologies. So it's like, it's almost like saying, what do you think of pills? Or something like that. Like, like there's just so many. There's there's opioid peptides. There are dissociative peptides, There are all kinds of hormonally modulating peptides. There's all these peptides that have potential performance enhancing effects in an athletic context.
- [02:53]
Lily Ottinger
To put this in perspective, insulin is a peptide. Ozempic's active ingredient, semaglutide is a peptide. Also, the growth hormones in your body are peptides. So when we talk about Chinese peptides, we're talking about a vast universe of different substances with wildly different effects. From the FDA approved weight loss drugs that cost $1,000 a month to to experimental compounds that have only been tested on rats. Hundreds of amino acids exist in nature. So the total number of possible peptide compounds is truly enormous. Even if we only consider compounds containing the 20ish amino acids that make up proteins in the human body, the number of possible peptides is around 10 to the 65th power.
- [03:30]
Hamilton Morris
There is not a single peptide controlled substance. So there aren't any illegal peptides. The reason being that historically they haven't been considered drugs of abuse that were of interest to law enforcement. And they are also, at least by sort of conventional drug manufacturing standards, are difficult to produce. The traditional law enforcement concern was, you know, people gathering chemicals to make drugs and you can't really make peptides easily in your home. I mean, someone could do it, but it's a little bit more difficult than typical small molecule synthesis of the type that law enforcement historically has been interested in. Then another reason is that they feel kind of natural to some people, maybe because they're made of amino acids and maybe that's somehow conceptually less threatening than a synthetic anabolic steroid or something like that.
- [04:37]
Lily Ottinger
Peptide sellers on the Chinese Internet are very, very eager to hook you up. So ChinaTalk analyst Irene Zhang went undercover on Xiahongshu to scope things out.
- [04:47]
Irene Zhang
I channeled my inner peptide curious American consumer and followed the accounts of 10 different self proclaimed peptide factories in one go. Within one day, all 10 followed me back. Their export operations were very efficiently streamlined. The sellers sent me price lists, videos of production at storage facilities and lab reports, sometimes even without prompting from me. A seller we'll call Alice was the first to get back to me. She caught my eye because her account featured many videos of Christmas trees, seemingly in an effort to appeal to western customers. We messaged first on Xiaohongshu or RedNote. But once I asked for price list, she insisted on moving the conversation to TikTok, Instagram or WhatsApp. Via WhatsApp, I received a series of videos featuring more Christmas trees. Purposefully situated next to fridges full of color coded vials. Her company, she tells me, has factories in Guangzhou and Beijing, and she can ship any quantity of at least 10 vials to a US address in around 10 days. US bound orders have to hit this 10 volume minimum to justify the $60 shipping cost and $20 customs fees, so bulk buying is incentivized from the beginning.
- [05:58]
Lily Ottinger
But what kind of peptides are on the menu? Tirzepatide is a GLP1 medication used to treat diabetes and assist with weight loss. It's FDA approved and sold under brand names like Manjaro and Zepbound. If you order from Alice, 105 milligram vials of tirzepatide will set you back $48. 10 vials is about two and a half months worth once shipping and customs fees are factored in. This works out to about $50 a month if you're ordering the minimum every time. By comparison, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which invented Zepbound, charges $399 a month for the same 5 milligram dosage for patients without insurance. Alice also offers more exotic peptides, ghkcu, a copper based peptide recently profiled in Vogue for skin care and anti aging, epithelon for quote unquote longevity, injectable vitamin B12 and good old bacteriostatic water to keep things sanitary. For Zepbound, the maximum recommended dosage for weight loss is 15mg once a week, with most patients starting at 2.5mg. But Alice will sell you vials containing up to 60mg GLP1. Dosing errors can lead to nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, fainting, headache, migraine, dehydration, acute pancreatitis and gallstones per the Food and Drug Administration. To confirm the quality of her products, Alice sent Irene a photo of a lab report produced by Janeschik, a major testing laboratory located in the Czech Republic. Named after a Robin Hood like character from Slovak folklore, Janesik maintains a public database of its tests, but Alice's company had the test done anonymously, so there was no way for chinatalk to find out if the report, produced back in November of 2025 was real.
- [07:31]
Irene Zhang
I tell Alice I will think about it. She notices my WhatsApp profile picture, asks if I'm ethnically Chinese. I am, and invites me to go eat Peking Duck with her if I'm ever in Beijing.
- [07:43]
Lily Ottinger
Retail sales of peptides are technically illegal inside China since they are supposed to be regulated as medical products and only sold with government licenses. In 2024, China's National Medical Products Administration announced that it had busted three illicit distributors of injectable semaglutide. These operations allegedly made millions of dollars illegally selling injectable GLP1s for weight loss, and the two largest cases have been escalated to criminal prosecution. Beijing's anti doping agency warned in a 2025 social media post that injecting BPC157, a peptide popular among some athletes, is not permitted in official sports. This domestic scrutiny explains why most of the sellers unsubtly plying their trade on Xiao Hongshu are targeting foreign clientele. Chance on, also a pseudonym, is an advertising consultant in Shandong who specializes in helping Chinese companies advertise on Western platforms. Starting in 2024, he began receiving a large wave of inquiries from peptide manufacturers who smelled business opportunities abroad. Most of these factories are located either in heartland regions like Shandong, Shanxi and Henan or in Guangdong. Chance mostly helps them promote on Facebook, but also works through TikTok and Google Ads. He says his job is getting harder as Western platforms increasingly scrutinize this type of content, and accounts easily get banned. Nevertheless, business is booming. The largest buyer base is in the US Followed by Canada, Australia and Latin America.
- [09:07]
Irene Zhang
When I ask him if factories know that most Western customers are using their products for DIY wellness rather than research, he replies immediately, yes.
- [09:17]
Lily Ottinger
According to U.S. customs data, imports of hormone and peptide compounds from China roughly doubled to $328 million in the first three quarters of 2025. That's up from $164 million in the same period of 2024. Most of these factories are located in Guangdong Province, which is home to about 70% of China's manufacturers of peptides for cosmetic purposes. Shandong, Shaanxi and Henan are also major hubs. To be clear, going undercover was not our first choice as far as reporting methods go. But no one working at these peptide factories was interested in doing a recorded interview with us. Hamilton ran into a similar dilemma when he reported on China manufactured cannabinoids for Vice.
- [09:57]
Hamilton Morris
Yeah, and I'm not surprised you've had difficulty, because anyone manufacturing these sorts of things would have very little to gain by talking to you about it and potentially a lot to lose. And it's also conceivable that they don't know all that much about these compounds. So that was something that struck me in my own visits to China. To meet with a lot of the chemists and people that work in these gray market labs is they often have very little understanding of what they're selling because they don't need to, it's not necessary. They see that there's a demand for something. There's a tremendous demand for GLP1 agonists right now. So any enormous numbers of people have heard good things about Ozempic. Now even many thin people take Ozempic, I guess, to become even thinner, or there's some idea that it may have an anti addictive effect or whatever, maybe some kind of effect for your longevity, who knows what. But the reality is that tons and tons of people who wouldn't qualify for a prescription for a GLP1 agonist still want to take them and they want to access them as inexpensively as possible. And so if you're running a gray market chemical supply company, that's all that matters, is that there's people that want semaglutide or whatever. Semaglutide like GLP1 agonists are out there. I've been very interested in the Chinese gray market for most of my life because I'm interested in the history of underground drug chemistry. And there was such an enormous effort to prevent domestic synthesis of psychoactive drugs in the United States that a lot of the market shifted to China and India. And it became cheaper, easier and less legally risky to contract the synthesis of a psychoactive drug in a foreign country than to produce it domestically. And so I wanted to learn more about this because most of the reporting that I'd seen was very negative, or it would paint the people that own these labs in a very negative light, like talking about how dirty the labs were or suggesting that what they were doing was toxic or dangerous. And in my experience, having analyzed a lot of samples that came from these labs in China, if anything, I was typically impressed by the purity. I mean, of course there were instances of dangerous misrepresentation or impure things being sold, but for the most part I would say that the quality was very high and was every bit as good as anything you'd expect to be produced domestically. So this idea that these diabolical Chinese chemists were making dangerous drugs to destroy the United States, which even has in some more recent reporting, like a specific kind of fear mongering tone about this being like some kind of bizarre opium war revenge, this is like an idea that you sometimes encounter. So I thought all this stuff was ridiculous and wanted to sympathetically document and analyze exactly what was going on with really an emphasis on how interesting the chemistry was. And it was very difficult, even though I was entirely sympathetic and non judgmental about Everything that was going on, Even if they did trust me, there's nothing to gain. And so I thought that I could get into one of these labs if I worked with a buyer who had poured millions of dollars into the synthetic cannabinoid industry, this guy Matt Bowden. And even he was unable to arrange this. But then I had this idea that maybe they would allow us to film inside the labs if we reframed what we were doing as using the labs as a location to film a rock opera. And. And this actually did work, surprisingly. And so we brought in costumes and instruments and amplifiers and all the stuff into one of these Chinese cannabinoid labs and filmed a rock opera inside it, but then also use this as an opportunity to document some of the chemistry. And it worked. And on top of that, they really liked it. They loved his music. They were big fans of his music and thought the entire thing was great.
- [14:25]
Lily Ottinger
That was a bit of a tangent, but I also love the rock opera, so I wanted to include this story in full. Anyway, of all the peptides flooding into America, one has captured the imagination of biohackers perhaps more than any other. That would be BPC157, sometimes called the Wolverine peptide for its purported ability to heal injuries at superhuman speed.
- [14:44]
Biohacker/Tech Worker
The other really popular one that I heard a lot was BPC157, which is often taken with TB500. These are for muscle healing. So they actually were pioneered by the bodybuilding and fitness community, because if you have a really hard workout and you want to recover, people would inject this to supposedly, like, make cells regenerate faster, or if you sprain your ankle, or if you have, like a bum knee or something like that. People would use BPC to spot treat sports injuries. Again, this has not been in trials. It's only been tested in rats, actually. But people experience positive anecdotal effects from it.
- [15:24]
Lily Ottinger
I talked to two people who are putting BPC157 to the test in pretty extreme ways. Marcus is a former molecular biology student who is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot in the spine in 2022. David is attempting to use BPC157 to regrow flesh. He lost to a brown recluse. Spider bite.
- [15:41]
Aaron Kesselheim
Oh, boy. So I actually moved up to Charlotte, North Carolina, about a year ago, got stung in the back by a baby brown recluse. Ended up in the ICU for about.
- [15:53]
Hamilton Morris
Three weeks with a tube in my.
- [15:54]
Aaron Kesselheim
Mouth and had about 4 pounds of flesh liquefied on my back.
- [15:58]
Hamilton Morris
So it was a limb Loser. Six months later I've been on high.
- [16:02]
Aaron Kesselheim
Doses of the Glow Blend BPC157, and.
- [16:06]
Hamilton Morris
I've probably regained about 80% of that.
- [16:08]
Aaron Kesselheim
Fleshback nerve damage is completely gone.
- [16:12]
Hamilton Morris
I went through four surgeries to kind.
- [16:13]
Aaron Kesselheim
Of correct the injury, but to be honest, the BPC157 did most of the work.
- [16:19]
Hamilton Morris
BPC157 is effectively a miracle drug, and I've started to experience some sensory recovery.
- [16:25]
Aaron Kesselheim
In the lower half of my body.
- [16:26]
Hamilton Morris
As well as involuntary motor function that should not have existed.
- [16:31]
Lily Ottinger
My conversation with Marcus and David left me feeling conflicted. Their claims about BPC157 are incredible, but without clinical trials, we really can't say for sure if peptide injections deserve the credit, and we certainly don't know what risks are involved. But the reality is that the pharmaceutical industry doesn't seem interested in researching this compound, let alone bringing it to market. Can you really blame people suffering from life altering injuries for turning to the gray market then? So what does the actual science say? The BPC in BPC157 stands for Body Protection Compound. It's a synthetic 15amino acid peptide originally isolated from human gastric juice by researchers in Croatia. A 2025 systematic review examined 36 studies on BPC157 published from 1993 to 2020. Four. Of those 35 were animal studies, and only one was a clinical study in humans. The animal studies did show promising accelerated tendon healing, improved ligament repair, faster muscle fiber regeneration. But here's the catch. Over 80% of all BPC157 studies originate from or are linked to a single research group at the University of Zagreb. And the phase one clinical trial that began in 2015 in humans was mysteriously canceled the year after, and the results were never published. The FDA classifies BPC157 as a Category 2 bulk drug substance, meaning it cannot be legally compounded by pharmacies. And there's insufficient evidence on whether it would cause harm to humans. The World Anti Doping Agency banned it in 2022. For pharmaceutical companies, there are structural factors that make it difficult to justify investment in BPC157, a compound that generally boosts healing. Sounds great, but it's a nightmare for clinical trial design. And the widespread availability of BPC157 on the gray market would make it harder to recoup R and D costs. Finally, impurities are uniquely problematic in peptide synthesis. But to understand why, we have to take a look at how peptides are made. Peptide synthesis plays to China's strengths The technology that made all of this possible was invented by an American scientist named Bruce Merrifeld in 1963, a discovery that would earn him the Nobel Prize. Before Merrifeld, synthesizing peptides was agonizingly slow. When American biochemist Vincent Duvignon synthesized oxytocin, a hormone with just nine amino acids, in 1953, it was considered such an unprecedented accomplishment that he won the Nobel Prize in 1955. Merrifield's innovation was something called solid phase peptide synthesis, or spps. Imagine building a chain, one link at a time. But instead of holding the chain in your hands, you've anchored one end to a workbench. Each amino acid has a protective cap that prevents it from sticking to the wrong things. You remove the cap, attach the next link in the chain, wash away the excess reagents that drive the reaction, and repeat. When you're done, you release the whole chain from the base. This method increased efficiency from a fraction of a to over 99.5% per step, reducing what previously took years to a matter of days. BPC157 is a chain of 15amino acids, so you need to do 15 sequential reactions. If each step is 99.5% efficient, over 15 reactions, you end up with an overall purity of 92.7%. The remaining 7.3% is mostly made of similar peptides that are off by one link. And because they are so chemically similar to our desired product, they are hard to separate out afterwards. This is a nightmare from a regulatory perspective because the impurities are biologically active lookalike molecules with unexpected pharmacological effects. Even if we manage to get our final product to 99% purity, that would be a difficult pill to swallow for the fda. Manufacturers of small molecule drugs have to report any impurities present in concentrations at or above 0.1% of the final product to the FDA. While injectables are held to even stricter standards, you might be wondering how peptide medications like Ozempic and insulin were brought to market. How did they overcome the challenge of impurities? The answer is that they were produced in part through biological processes, not solid phase peptide synthesis alone. For insulin specifically, scientists genetically engineered bacteria to churn out the peptide when fed specific chemical inputs. The manufacturing process for semaglutide involves fermentation with yeast cells as well as SPPs. But purity concerns have not stopped Chinese manufacturers from churning out peptides using SPPS. Today, companies like GenScript, founded in 2002 and headquartered in Nanjing, can synthesize custom Peptides in as little as five days with a 95% synthesis success rate compared to the industrial average of 75%. In 2023, the Chinese pharmaceutical contracting giant WuXiabtech synthesized more than 15 tons of peptide based active pharmaceutical ingredients and intermediaries. And in 2024, the company tripled its total SPPS reactor volume to 32,000 liters. As a side note, you might know Wuxiabtech as the company initially targeted by the BioSecure act, which sought to prevent the weaponization of American genetic data by foreign pharmaceutical companies. The BioSecure act became law in late 2025, but Wusi Aptech managed to avoid being listed as a company of concern. For now anyway. The point is that peptide synthesis technology has become so widespread that every university has an automated peptide synthesizer. And peptides that once required Nobel Prize winning work are now manufactured at an industrial scale. That alone isn't enough to make peptide based therapies an economically viable treatment for diseases. It's doable, but these complications would cost money to deal with. So why is Silicon Valley ground zero for this trend? Part of it is the economics. Tech workers can afford to experiment, but there's something deeper going on.
- [22:01]
Biohacker/Tech Worker
I think I was like proud of it. Like, not everyone, but I think a lot of the people, like when I'm like, oh, are you scared? Because like, I don't know, I'm like freaked out, you know, I don't really like injecting myself with random chemicals. But I'd ask people like, aren't you worried about the risks? And they'd be like, ah, not really. Like, I know it's risky, but like you said, I'm a risk taker. I'm starting companies, I'm doing all sorts of other risky stuff. So like, anything for an edge, like if there's an upside that I might be able to get, like, I'm gonna go try anything to get it.
- [22:27]
Lily Ottinger
Hamilton Morris thinks there's another factor. Ozempic has fundamentally changed how Americans think about injecting drugs.
- [22:34]
Hamilton Morris
In the past, the idea of injecting a drug was very, very extreme in pretty much every context. If you were working in pharmaceutical drug development, any type of drug that had to be injected was a last resort. If you had no other options, it was really considered very, very undesirable. And I have seen this personally in my own interactions working with pharmaceutical companies. It was considered unacceptable. And that's changed dramatically as a result of Ozempic. But also even biologic drugs like Humira, Skyrizi, Bimzelics, things like that have become immensely popular. And so the idea of administering a drug via injection has become unobjectionable, somewhat commonplace. I mean, in the past it was like, you only inject drugs if it's a life or death scenario. And that's changed.
- [23:35]
Lily Ottinger
The next section of this podcast will be presented by Chinatalk's Tarbell fellow, Nick Corvino. Nick wanted to speak to someone who knew how the FDA worked from the inside to understand why peptides are in such a strange regulatory space.
- [23:48]
Hamilton Morris
So where is the FDA in all of this? We spoke to Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who's actually served on the FDA advisory committee.
- [23:58]
Aaron Kesselheim
The FDA has for many decades taken an approach regarding personal importation of unapproved products, that individuals can import unapproved products for their own personal use. And the FDA will take, you know, enforcement discretion with respect to those kinds of individual actions. But what the FDA will not allow is it will not allow companies to advertise and sell those products for health related purposes in the US Without FDA approval. And I think that that's a, you know, that's, that's been the law and the land for, you know, 60 plus years.
- [24:37]
Hamilton Morris
When a Chinese seller puts research use only on their products, it's meant to exploit this gray area. But this didn't fool the Biden era FDA. In a December 2024 warning letter to a company called Summit Research Peptides, the FDA wrote, quote, to cite statements on your product labeling, marketing your products as research use only. Evidence obtained from your website establishes that your products are intended to be drugs for human use. The FDA has called these kinds of disclaimers, quote, a ruse to avoid FDA scrutiny.
- [25:08]
Aaron Kesselheim
Well, I mean, I think that the manufacturers are labeling these things as research use only as a way of trying to cover themselves from the possibility of regulatory enforcement. If they don't do that, then they open themselves up to the possibility that the FDA will say to the manufacturer, you know, you're importing these drugs, you know, and intending them for people to use them for health related purposes, which is not allowed.
- [25:33]
Hamilton Morris
But a lot of what we're talking about here is the Biden era FDA, which is a lot different than Trump 2.0. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is case in point calling for what he describes as ending the war at the FDA against alternative medicine. And this includes peptides.
- [25:48]
Biohacker/Tech Worker
I think a lot of peptide enthusiasts were really optimistic about the new admin because RFK has talked or at least tweeted about ending the Biden Administration's opinion more on peptides. And there are a lot of rumors around peptide use within the admin. So multiple people on background tipped me off to the admin being like big peptide enthusiasts. There's I think two different people. I said straight up, like, is J.D. vance on peptides? And they told me no comment. I think that it seems like they are a pro peptide administration. I think what it really looks like is just taking a laissez faire approach to enforcement. Because I was going through the logs of FDA enforcement of peptide suppliers and pharmacies and in 2024 under the Biden FDA, they actually did send warning letters to a bunch of peptide pharmacies for like things like mislabeling, I. E. Like if you are selling research chemicals but you're including all of these claims on your website about like this is gonna make your skin better and this is gonna make you productive. Like those are claims about human use. And so the Biden FDA shut down a bunch of these suppliers. And as far as I can see from the FDA logs, these. The Trump administration under RFK has stopped enforcing it.
- [27:00]
Aaron Kesselheim
When RFK came in, he talked about, you know, unburdening sunlight and you know, as if the FDA was regulating sunlight and unburdening peptides. As if the FDA was, was regulating peptides in some, you know, particularly onerous way that it was. Wasn't doing for anything else. I don't think that was really true. I don't know that the FDA was singling out peptides in any particular way before the current administration.
- [27:29]
Lily Ottinger
So what are the actual risks of injecting gray market peptides? The honest answer is we don't fully know. The FDA has received over 600 adverse event reports associated with semaglutide alone. More than 15,000 vials of compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide were recalled in August 2024 due to an inability to assure that they were sterile.
- [27:49]
Biohacker/Tech Worker
One of the sources I talked to, she accidentally doubled her dose one day and that was just like her mistake. But then her hair started falling out and she couldn't eat food for two weeks. There was one instance I found in the news through like a ProPublica article that's like two women, like took a bunch of peptides at some longevity festival in Las Vegas. They didn't know what was in them. It was like a weird blend of stuff and they end up being hospitalized for breathing difficulties.
- [28:12]
Hamilton Morris
If I were in a position of having to inject a drug regularly, I would certainly prefer to be able to acquire it through some kind of regulated supply channel where there's some assumption that it's been tested and is pure. And these things are also a little bit harder to test. Like most of the analytical work that I've done, in fact pretty much all of it has been with small molecules. And you can inject a small molecule into a mass spectrometer and it's usually like pretty fast to get a sense of whether or not something is what it is supposed to be. I think that you need more specialized instrumentation to do analysis on some of these peptides.
- [28:58]
Lily Ottinger
There is almost something poetic about the fact that America's risk tolerant biohackers are relying on factories in China for their miracle drugs.
- [29:05]
Biohacker/Tech Worker
I think the peptides being Chinese makes it funnier and more mimetic. Like the, the phrase Chinese in front of peptides. Like I think people love saying it, but I do think, okay, I do think it's somewhat representative of the broader idea that people like Silicon Valley, like everybody else is getting China pilled. They all have China envy. I think there's this thing right now where I know so many people who over the holidays went to Shenzhen to like go and like see the robots and go to Hua Chung Bay and whatever. And I think Silicon Valley has, as you as, you know, like woken up over the past year to the idea that China is not just a copycat, but also doing a lot of technological innovation, also competing on the frontier and also surging ahead of the US in a lot of areas. When you ask, like, why are the peptides Chinese? Like people will say like, oh yeah, like they're beating us and everything right now. I would love to have American peptides, but like, we just don't have the ecosystem, we don't have the talent, our labor's too expensive. We don't have the manufacturing, like network effects, like it's all over there. And so I think it does come with sort of the broad, you know, China envy angle a little bit.
- [30:07]
Lily Ottinger
Until the mid-1990s, the west, including Japan, produced 90% of the world's active pharmaceutical ingredients. Today, China alone produces approximately 40% of all APIs. The government's five year plans consistently prioritized pharmaceutical manufacturing as a strategic industry. They created dedicated chemical industrial zones, provided export incentives and trained a massive workforce, and trained a massive workforce of chemists.
- [30:36]
Aaron Kesselheim
The prescription drug supply chain in the United States is a very complicated one. You know, we get a large number of our prescription drug active ingredients from China and even a larger number of the sort of you know, original compounds on which those prescription drugs are based, you know, are imported from China and other and other countries. But China is a, you know, is a major supplier. So you know, I think that the prescription drug supply chain is a very complicated one right now. And again, I think just also speaks to the importance of the FDA and the importance of the FDA being adequately funded and adequately staffed and having the resources and expertise at its disposal to be able to make sure that that supply chain continues to function at a very high level. The, you know, US has one of the safest, if not the safest, you know, pharmaceutical markets because of the FDA in the world. And I think that part of the concern about the undermining of the FDA's Scientific Integrity and resources and staffing in the last year relates to the FDA's abilities to, you know, maintain that level of quality control.
- [32:05]
Lily Ottinger
Marcus and David don't want the FDA to approve BPC 157. They worry it would just end up behind a paywall advisor.
- [32:12]
Hamilton Morris
I don't want the FDA to certify anything. I don't want them to touch it.
- [32:16]
Aaron Kesselheim
Because currently we have a really robust.
- [32:18]
Hamilton Morris
Infrastructure in place that has a lot of people making a living packaging and.
- [32:24]
Aaron Kesselheim
Selling and certifying their own products.
- [32:26]
Hamilton Morris
And it's sort of like right before.
- [32:30]
Aaron Kesselheim
Like weed started to get legalized everywhere.
- [32:32]
Hamilton Morris
A lot of people were like, no.
- [32:33]
Aaron Kesselheim
Don'T legalize it, just decriminalize.
- [32:35]
Hamilton Morris
We already have infrastructure, we already have entreprene in the space. Just decriminalize, don't legalize it because then we're going to get pushed out by Walmart.
- [32:43]
Lily Ottinger
Hamilton Morris isn't so sure self regulation is the answer when it comes to injectable drugs.
- [32:48]
Hamilton Morris
When it comes to injecting substances, I do think that the bar for purity is a little bit higher than with some other things like cannabis. Like this is a. I'm not somebody that necessarily thinks everything should be regulated and go through some kind of government approved framework unless that is a way of preventing people from getting arrested for using the drug. In that case, I'm very much in favor of regulation. But, but when it comes to things that are being injected, I think it is nice.
- [33:23]
Lily Ottinger
And Aaron Kesselheim reminds us that there's a reason we have drug regulation in the first place.
- [33:28]
Aaron Kesselheim
I think that if, if I was a, an ethical drug company, I would want a strong FDA because you know, I really believed in my drug and I had an important new drug. Then the FDA is not going to stand in the way of your of your, of your selling the product. In fact, the fact that your drug is, is, is really good and really effective and that an independent, you know, regulator like the FDA has said, look, your drug is very effective is a really strong indicator that this is a useful drug. And it means more people will take it and you'll sell more product and you will help more people. So if I was an ethical pharmaceutical company that had a really great invention, I would want a strong fda because I would, I would say, look, yeah, my, my drug is really great. I can show that it's really great. And, and the FDA has no problem approving really great new drugs.
- [34:27]
Lily Ottinger
And there are success stories as far as FDA approval for peptides is concerned. One example is PT141.
- [34:35]
Hamilton Morris
That's an interesting one that actually had this trajectory of initially being a sort of experimental scientific compound. Then people were so interested in it that it became a gray market commodity. So around probably 2005, 2006, I remember reading about it when I was a freshman in college because there was a chemist, William Leonard Picard, who had a very big LSD lab at one time. And when he was arrested, when he was in prison, he became very interested in these like, pharmacovigilance issues related to gray market substances. And he was really convinced that PT141 would be very dangerous. There are some kind of scaremongering stories about how it would raise all these bioethical issues. Because the idea was that this was the first real aphrodisiac, that drugs like Viagra or Cialis had this sort of hemodynamic effect, but they weren't affecting the psychology of arousal, they were purely physiological, whereas PT141 was causing actual arousal. And what does that mean if you have a drug that can make anyone aroused at any time? And will this create all kinds of bioethical issues relating to consent? These are all, you know, interesting, valid questions to ask around 2006. But then people started using it and as is typically the case, all these like, bioethical concerns were not really the issue that emerged. It was more that people who had moles found that their moles were darkening. Because this is like it was initially being developed as a sunless tanning agent. Right? That was how, like, as is the case with so many of these things, it was a serendipitous discovery. They thought that this sunless tanning agent would, you know, help people who are at risk for skin cancer. And then it turned out to have this aphrodisiac effect. That was unanticipated via an interaction with melanocortin receptors, which I don't think anyone at that time had implicated in sexual arousal. And so it was again, because, as I was saying earlier, up until somewhat recently, maybe the last five or so years, injecting drugs was pretty taboo. So it initially caught on in the bodybuilding community, where injecting drugs is normalized because it's actually like the safest way to administer a lot of anabolic steroids in terms of potentially avoiding hepatotoxicity. So on bodybuilding forums, PT141 became very popular. And then it actually did get approved by the FDA under the name Bremelanotide. So it is now approved for female hypoactive sexual desire disorder and is sold.
- [37:36]
Lily Ottinger
For now. The gray market continues to grow. Factories in Guangzhou keep churning out vials of these compounds, and tech workers in San Francisco keep injecting. The question of whether these miracle drugs actually work or whether they're slowly doing harm remains unanswered.
- [37:51]
Hamilton Morris
But if you create a drug that is sufficiently interesting, sometimes a market will emerge for that drug before it's even passed through a formal regulatory process. So there's enough people that are interested in longevity or athletic performance enhancement or cognitive enhancement or weight loss or whatever that they don't even want to wait for a drug to be approved by the fda. They'll just get, get to using it as a gray market compound. And I think if you were to ask most responsible medical professionals about this, they would tell you that it's, you know, dangerous and should be avoided. I think that there certainly is danger associated with taking drugs that are insufficiently tested. There's also danger taking drugs that have been approved. And I think people sometimes have a tendency to overestimate the safety of things that have gone through a formal regulatory process and underestimate the safety of things that haven't been studied in that same way. Just because something hasn't been approved doesn't necessarily mean that it's dangerous. I mean, there are all kinds of financial incentives that are part of the drug development world. Someone may discontinue pharmaceutical development of a substance simply because they think it's not economically viable, as opposed to being concerned about toxicity or something like that.
- [39:24]
Lily Ottinger
In other words, maybe these peptides are working miracles. Maybe they're nothing, maybe they're dangerous. The only way for sure is to run clinical trials that no one has bothered to fund until then. America's biohackers are all just subjects in an enormous uncontrolled experiment. This episode was produced by Lily Ottinger. Special thanks to Jasmine Sun, Hamilton Morris, Aaron Kesselheim, Marcus and David, as well as our analysts Irene Zhang and Nick Corvino for reporting. If you want to learn more, check out Jasmine Sun's New York Times article entitled Chinese Peptides are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World. Finally, Chinatalk is launching a series of merch for Chinese New Year. Check out our new designs on Chinatalk Printful me. We worked with human artists to bring these designs to life and we're really excited about the results. Chinatalk is an audience supported publication. If you'd like to help us produce more content like this, please consider a paid subscription on Substack and have a great day.