Another Molecule You Cannot Buy

A phase 2 trial of VK2735, another dual GIP/GLP-1 agonist, reported 14.7% weight loss in thirteen weeks.^[1] That is a faster rate than anything on the market has published, and it is about to be quoted without the second half of the sentence. The drug is not approved anywhere, and thirteen weeks is not a quarter of a year’s worth of a curve that flattens.

What the trial reported

VENTURE enrolled adults carrying excess weight who also had at least one condition tied to it, excluded anyone with diabetes, and assigned them weekly injections of VK2735 at one of several strengths or a placebo, for 13 weeks.

Across the active arms, 130 of 140 people — 93% — shed 5% or more. On placebo, 4 of 34 did. Adverse events were gastrointestinal, as expected, and became less frequent once the dose stopped climbing.

Why you cannot annualize this

The honest comparison is not against a 68- or 72-week result at all. It is against where the established drugs stood at their thirteenth week, and those figures are not reported alongside this one. A short trial can look extraordinary purely by being measured during the steep part of the curve.

That is not a criticism of the trial, which is a dose-ranging phase 2 doing exactly what a dose-ranging phase 2 should. It is a caution about the sentence that will circulate.

The endpoint the abstract does not report

The trial’s stated secondary endpoints include the proportion of participants losing at least 5% and the proportion losing at least 10%. The published abstract reports the first — 93% against 12% — and does not report the second.

The 10% threshold is the more informative of the two, because 5% is cleared by most people on any drug in this class and does not discriminate between them. We do not know what that figure was, we are not going to estimate it, and its absence from a summary that reports its companion is worth a reader’s attention.

And it is not something you can be prescribed

VK2735 is in phase 2. It has no approval in any country, no label, no approved manufacturer, and no route to a pharmacy. What that means in practice is the same thing it meant for retatrutide: a promising early result raises demand that the legitimate supply chain cannot meet, and unlabeled vials appear online to fill the gap.

A phase 2 headline is the strongest marketing a gray-market seller will ever get for free.

The material used in this trial was manufactured to clinical-trial standard, at a verified concentration, with a known impurity profile. A powder sold under the same name has none of those properties verified, because there is no approved product to verify it against. The same reasoning, at greater length, is in retatrutide’s phase 3 and the gray market.