The money
The money: 8 articles from Peptidesfact. Long-form reporting on peptide science.
The Free Samples That Cost $875 Million
A peptide analogue for advanced prostate cancer made a joint venture rich, and then made it the subject of what the Justice Department called the largest criminal fine in a health care fraud case. The story is about arithmetic: a list price nobody paid, and a box of samples with an invoice attached.
The Peptide That Needed Its Own Factory
Enfuvirtide, a 36-residue piece of a viral protein, was approved in 2003 as the first drug of its kind. Making it required a purpose-built plant, a process of more than a hundred steps, and a price that drew protest from the people who needed it most.
The San Diego Company That Got There First
Amylin Pharmaceuticals was founded on a hormone found in the wrecked pancreases of diabetic patients, nearly died in 1998, launched two first-in-class peptide medicines in the spring of 2005, and was sold in 2012. The first mover did not become the winner.
The Compounding Boom, and How It Ended
The statute was written in 2013 and the window it opened for the GLP-1 drugs closed in 2025. This is what grew inside that window, why it kept going after the window shut, and the enforcement year that finally ended it on three continents.
The Fight Over Who Pays for an Obesity Drug
On 1 July 2026 Medicare began paying for obesity medicines for the first time — not by changing the law that forbids it, but by working around it. The long argument over cost, value and fairness that led there, on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Grey Market That Grew in the Gap
By the summer of 2026 a drug that no regulator had approved had a retail trade, a payment system and its own testing culture. How a research-reagent market and a wellness market came to share the same sellers — and what regulators saw, and when.
The Molecule That Moved a Country's GDP
For two years, most of Denmark's economic growth was the output of one industry, dominated by one company selling one class of peptide medicine. What that did to a small economy's statistics, its currency and its public finances — and what happened when the company stumbled.
The Patent Cliff and the First Generic Peptide Blockbuster
On 20 March 2026 the compound patent on semaglutide expired in India, China and Brazil, months after it had quietly lapsed in Canada. For the first time a best-selling peptide medicine began to go generic — country by country, and on no common timetable.