GLP-1 agonists are a bit more tricky since they are temperature sensitive and need to be injected. You'll really need to be careful to keep it sterile and handle it properly. Whether the "research chemical" will receive the proper care until it gets into your hands is something that you're literally gambling your health on.
You ship it as a dry/lypohilized powder, both semaglutide and tirzepatide survives long China->Europe shipping in the summer just fine, with customs delays. The testing I've seen showed 99.965% purity of semaglutide after 22 days in shipping from China to Poland during April. Tirzepatide shows 99.064% purity after 58 days of shipping in October-November. These didn't start out at 100.00% purity either, so they likely experienced absolutely minimal degradation in shipment.
You reconstitute it with Bacteriostatic Water which is available without a prescription in the USA and contains 0.9% benzyl alcohol to inhibit bacterial growth.
If you're particularly concerned you buy a 0.22 micrometer PVDF "syringe filter" and pump it through that to another, fresh/sealed sterile vial which you can get for like $2.00 from a medical supply company (the syringe, filter, and vials are gamma-irradiated to destroy any remnants of RNA/DNA). That size filtration will filter out any lifeforms (fungal, bacterial, viral) while allowing the peptide/drug itself to pass through. So you get a guaranteed sterile solution out of the filter.
> That size filtration will filter out any lifeforms (fungal, bacterial, viral) while allowing the peptide/drug itself to pass through
0.22 won't filter out viruses, but time will inactivate enveloped viruses (which are usually the ones you want to avoid injecting), and source control/proper handling should take care of the rest.
Anything specific would be inappropriate for this forum. But the broad answer is a chemicals distributor in China. I actually only utilize them for legal "nutritional" compounds, but others use them for pharmaceutical options, and those are independently tested frequently by a variety of stakeholders. Personally I really wish US citizens didn't feel forced to go outside of the quality protections of the FDA for their medical care.
Nutritional compounds? My understanding is that without a lot of special processing, GLP-1 agonists (semiglutide, liraglutide, tirzepatide, etc) will be degraded by stomach acids into useless fragments. There's an oral semiglutide formulation but it looks like it's quite inefficient and has some pretty strigent requirements in order to be effective.
What? No one is taking these orally. Hence the bacteriostatic water for injection.
The same distributor sells legal things to import like L-Carnitine, Epitalon, Berberine, NAD+, NACET, and vitamins at great prices so I was saying I use them for things like that.
But others use them for GLP-1 agonists and many do their own independent testing.
FWIW, SubQ injections are pretty much completely unnoticeable in terms of pain / feeling at all. It’s more the mental barrier of doing it to yourself but once you’ve done it for the first time you soon realise it’s fine.
The actual doing it seems wild/absurd, but I don't think that would hold me back.
This is ignorant/uniformed, but, taking research chemical by ingestion feels like I have some natural barriers still. Where-as I feel like there's a much more raw exposure to risk with injection. Also there's dumb risks like infection, if I don't attend well enough to injections.
In spite of these protests, I think you are probably much closer to the truth here. Thanks for writing. These reactions I have are, I suspect, not really significant.
Hopefully the price will come down more as it becomes more prevalent or as generics become available.