Peptides:- What you need to know.

Now, the TGA has raised concerns about unapproved peptide products.

Why are we hearing so much about these now? It's not

really sudden.

It's been something that's been happening for quite a while, but there has been an explosion over the past four years.

But the use of peptides goes back some time, back to the 20s and 30s with monkey gland extracts and has accelerated since then.

So...

Again, these are generally grouped under performance and image enhancing drugs, where they can either improve your ability to recover from injury in terms of athletics or improve your endurance in athletics, prove weight loss, muscle definition and things like that.

Ian, we should probably clarify that these are claimed or perceived benefits.

For many of these products, the clinical evidence in humans is limited or absent.

Is that fair?

Yeah, people have been using weird and wonderful substances for weight loss and health improvement for almost as long as there's been humans.

Back in the turn of the 19th, 20th century, the favoured drugs were strychnine and cocaine.

We've moved on a bit from that.

And of course, I mean, the monkey testicle.

Recently, though, there was a...

the use of an industrial chemical, which is basically an industrial poison and can cause your organs to liquefy because it causes your body to go into thermal deregulation.

So people take all sorts of wild and wonderful things in the hope that they will get that bit of extra muscle definition or lose a bit of weight and things like that.

So peptides have been one more arm of the desire to look better, move faster, excel at sport and so on.

So for many of these unapproved peptides, we don't have a good clinical evidence in humans showing that they provide the benefits being claimed.

That's

correct.

Correct.

For the majority of the ones, they either have not been proven or have been proven not to work in the first place.

But they still remain popular, despite actual evidence that they don't work.

Talking about getting a drug approved, we have to look at an evidence portfolio.