The Drugs That Are Not Here Yet

Four molecules in development have published human results, and the most striking number among them — 8% of body weight in four weeks — comes from the earliest and smallest study of the four.^[4] That is not a coincidence. Ranking these drugs by their headline figures ranks them by how short their trials were, and every one of them will reach peptide sellers before it reaches a pharmacy.

What has actually been published

The finding worth caring about is not a weight number

LY3537021 is the least impressive drug in that table and the most interesting entry in it. It is a GIP receptor agonist on its own — no GLP-1 component — which makes it an experiment on the question the whole field wants answered.

It produced dose-dependent weight loss that persisted 35 days after the last dose. And it did so with no delay in gastric emptying at any dose tested, and infrequent gastrointestinal side effects.

Weight came off without the stomach being slowed down.

That matters because delayed gastric emptying is where the nausea, vomiting and constipation come from, and those are why people stop — roughly one in ten in the trials covered elsewhere on this register. If GIP produces weight loss by a route that does not involve slowing the stomach, then the side effects and the benefit may be separable, which nobody has yet demonstrated in an approved drug.

Two cautions on the same result. The weight effect is modest at these doses — 3.14 kg against 0.36 kg on placebo. And the glucose effect did not hold: reductions in fasting glucose were transient and were no longer significantly different from placebo by day 29. On this evidence GIP alone looks like a weight drug rather than a diabetes drug, which is not what a GIP agonist was expected to be.

The biweekly one

Bofanglutide is designed to be injected once every two weeks, and posted the largest weight reduction in the table — up to 16.69% at 30 weeks against 1.15% on placebo, in 340 Chinese adults.

That is the disciplined version of something people already improvise. Stretching a weekly drug to fortnightly, to make it affordable, rests on a mathematical model and two patients — stretching doses to save money. A molecule engineered for that interval and tested at it is a different proposition entirely. Amgen’s MariTide pushes the interval further, to monthly or less often, and is already in phase 3.

Two further limits on transferring that result. The trial used Chinese BMI thresholds, where overweight begins at 24 and obesity at 28 rather than the 25 and 30 used in the United States, so the population is lighter than a Western trial of the same labels. And the average participant was 33 years old.

What this means for what appears online

Every drug above is unapproved. None has a label, an approved manufacturer, or a legal route to a pharmacy. A published phase 2 result is the strongest free marketing a gray-market seller ever receives, and the pattern is established — we track eleven sellers already offering retatrutide, which is also unapproved everywhere, in retatrutide’s phase 3 and the gray market.

• Phase 1 means safety and dose-finding, in tens of people, over weeks. It is not evidence a drug works.
• Phase 2b means a dose has been chosen and an effect estimated in a few hundred people. It is not evidence a drug is safe over years.
• A short trial flatters every drug in this class. Check the duration before the percentage.
• Certainty gradings exist. The BMJ synthesis of 262 trials rates the newest agents very low to low certainty — what 262 trials say together.

One housekeeping note: the aleniglipron paper carries a published erratum whose contents we have not read. We mention it because a correction exists, not because we know what it changes.