TL;DR

The peptide market is experiencing rapid growth, driven by consumer interest in advanced recovery and cellular regeneration. While research into peptides is still in its early stages, particularly concerning extensive clinical trials, anecdotal evidence and preliminary data suggest significant potential. This has led to a willingness among early adopters, including biohackers and health enthusiasts, to invest in these often high-cost compounds. A key challenge in the peptide space is ensuring optimal bioavailability and effective delivery, a problem that innovative solutions like advanced encapsulation and liposomal systems aim to address. The combination of multiple peptides into ‘stacks’ is also gaining traction, with the rationale that the synergistic effects could yield greater benefits than individual peptides alone. However, this practice introduces regulatory complexities, as combining independently cleared ingredients can inadvertently create new regulatory classifications, emphasizing the need for all market participants—from manufacturers to compounding pharmacies and clinicians—to operate within established guidelines. As the regulatory landscape evolves, particularly with increasing FDA scrutiny, the industry is focused on developing highly bioavailable and well-researched peptide formulations, leveraging intellectual property to enhance performance and ensure market leadership for reputable manufacturers.

Understanding the Evolving Peptide Landscape

Ulli: Oh, I can start. So the the Wolverine Stack is a colloquial name that emerged. It’s peptide core in the consumer. Market with the name of Wolverine. Don’t know if everybody’s aware of that. It’s a comic character. It was in the X-Men and then had its own movie franchise. And anyway, it’s it’s a Wolverine. It is in reference to Wolverine. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Now there are two things to that. It is in reference to Wolverine, the comic character, but the Wolverine in General, the name for the comic character came from the actual animal that is called a Wolverine. It’s an extremely ferocious predator. It has very long claws as showcased and exaggerated in the movie franchises.

Ulli: There aren’t many, they’re very shy, they’re they’re very furtive, but they are absolutely lethal. And therefore, that was an easy characteristic to move. Over into you Jack Men being very ripped, having these iron claws being virtually impossible to defeat. Hence, the fitness and regenerative medicine community over the last few years has coined this term, the wolverine stack. The wolverine stack is generally known to be two peptides. One is called body protecting compound 157.

Abbreviated BPC 157. The other one is called TB500. That is a smaller version of Timasin 4 peptide. The interesting piece is that one of the qualities that the comic character Wolverine has is that he heals extremely fast, which is why he’s so dangerous.

Ulli: And these two peptides are both known for tissue regeneration, wound healing, helping with recovery, helping with managing inflammation of soft tissue. The piece about this, the combination of the two in the so-called Wolverine stack is that there is anecdotal thought that when they are administered together in the same formulation, that they have synergistic. Effects, meaning they cross-pollinate each other. Therefore, if you are a serious workout fan, if you are a serious, serious bodybuilder, fitness, regenerative medicine practitioner, you are interested to generate the fastest wound healing possible in your personal life. You want to avoid sore muscles, you want to show Recovery time. I’m sure this is something that professional athletes have been talking a lot about, not peptides, but recovery time, that the older you get, recovery is the single most strategic element of exercise that you need to pay attention to.

Optimizing Peptide Bioavailability and Delivery Systems

Ulli: You would you pair a very, very, and I’m biased, but a very cool, very catchy pop culture name with two ingredients in the peptide world that have. Incredible, incredible benefits for, as I said, tissue repair, micro-chair repairs, muscle regeneration, avoiding a long recovery time. And you have something that everybody, almost everybody in that universe can relate to. That’s why it’s so visible in the searches. It’s a fantastic name., would you rather say Wolverine or would you rather say BPC 157 and TV 500?

Will: Yeah, nobody looks for the snail stack or anything like that. But, it in reality, Uli’s given you the exceptional analysis from the sharpest possible professional marketer that she is. And it makes total sense. People like to keep things, simple and she said it, in a very succinct fashion, the older you get. And I can tell you, you’ve got a couple of us on this call. Hendrik’s always out on his mouth. And he’s running and he’s preparing for these races and so on. And we talk about this all the time. I’m in the gym all the time, and it’s not the way it was 20 years ago. Whether you are whether you are lifting weights or you’re doing something else athletically and you’re young or you’re old, you’re either feeling the strains from the workout or you’re simply wanting to recover faster.

Will: And as Uli said, there is a synergy. Between these two, whether it’s a synergy that comes out because they’re paired or they’re just very complementary by design. And I’ll emphasize there’s not a lot of studies that have been completed on these yet, where still relatively early in the days of peptides, there is some data, but it’s it’s very limited data compared to the depth of research we have on a lot of other things, established drugs, supplements, etc. Were in the early days. But BPC 157 is designed to go after tendons, joints, nerves, whereas the TB500 is more cellular repair, soft tissue repair. In that sense, they’re very complementary in that they overlap but target slightly different parts of the body. And if you’re working out several times a week, whether you’re young or you’re old, that ability to keep going, know that your body is repairing itself as quickly as possible is what people are seeking.

Will: Your question was about what are they searching for. They’re searching for this quick recovery so that they can keep doing what they’re doing, do more of it, do it well, know that they’re going to be ready for their next outing athletically and be as strong and recovered as possible. Sadly at a very high cost these are these are not cheap, which is why I think we’re at the front edge of this adoption cycle and the people who have been seeking out these individual peptides, this stack and other things, they’re paying a lot of money for these products, but they’ve shown a willingness to pay. Historically it’s been bodybuilders, it’s people who are using, other things that have had a high price tag associated with them. And they’re adding this to their routine or they’re substituting peptides for other things in their arsenal.

Will: And they’re willing to put out the cash for it. And that adoption curve is growing. More people are coming to the party, so to speak, and willing to pay money for these things because of the reputation that BPC 157, TB500, the Wolverine Stack, and other peptides have started to exhibit. And it’s now more than just anecdotal because there’s so many people who are using these products.

Will: Yeah.

That makes total. Sense and it it the description of how they work together with each other makes a lot of sense why the sum of the parts would be greater than the separate values so to speak but leads into that leads into the next question here which are what are consumers clinics and biohacker audiences typically looking for when they’re trying to find a recovery peptide stack.

Ulli: Yeah, I think we mentioned that or like in a semi-roundabout world, we answered that in the first question., there are things that Will was mentioning, cellular level repair, regeneration of cells that are either hit by oxidative stress or that have inflammation residing within them. They’re looking For it, I’ll give you an example. This is a little bit a different world, but it’s it’s maybe a good example. One of the most powerful or some of the most powerful consumer products in the cosmetics industry over the last maybe 20 years came out of clinical treatment for burn victims. And so this is a very similar approach in terms of how do you Stimulate repair and new growth of skin cells in a burn victim that is a very closely adjacent thought process or logic that to how do you avoid the signs of aging?

Ulli: How do you avoid having sun damage on like what can You do to counterbalance these effects? And a lot of the science came from this: how do you treat burn victims? How do you regenerate skin cells and other functional cells? That moved into skincare. And I think peptides are very, very similar. When we talk about anti-inflammant and anti-inflammatory properties, we talk about antioxidant properties, we talk about tissue repair. That all leads into recovery. And those elements will then help get stronger faster or stay strong longer, which goes into the biohacking, making sure that your tissue deterioration that comes with life and age is either slowed or halted to some extent.

Ulli: And so that’s what you would be looking for, right? In order to address inflammation, in order to address oxidative stress, you need very, very powerful antioxidants and an ingredient, in this case a peptide, that sends signals to the cells to go into repair and rebuild mode. That’s what you’re looking for.

Will: Okay. Yeah, I think what Uli is describing is that it’s hard, it’s innovation. They’re they’re looking for the the highest quality, most innovative products that are available to them and their business and their their channel customers. And along with that, differentiation both now for the product portfolio and going forward differentiation for business and strategy. Reasons. Which there’s a lot to say about that. This is really not a commercial, but that’s the space that Tesseract plays in, is offering differentiation through its IP portfolio. We’ll we’ll talk about that in a lot of other ways, so I won’t dwell on it now. But ultimately our ability to deliver things in multiple different formats with multiple different technologies is how we help our channel partners strategically.

Will: But ultimately one The things I think they’re looking for, and probably the reason they’re looking most often is to find consistent supply. One of the things that we hear in almost every conversation is that the availability of the products is spotty right now. The structure of the industry has not yet come together. Much of the supply is coming out of Asia, and it’s very Hard to get consistently. It’s even harder to get it in a high quality format, as Uli alludes to, and get that high quality on a regular basis.

Sourcing it domestically in the US, which is what people aspire to and they’re even willing to pay a premium, is a really big challenge.

Will: And so right now, particularly US buyers are having a real challenge finding what they want. Where and when they want. And so they’re looking for multiple sources so that they have backup suppliers and are not sole sourcing. But they’re still having to wait a long time to get what they want from peptide manufacturers. There’s tremendous opportunity in this space for new manufacturers, but it’s also capital intensive to set up and get established in the market. And so that’s changing, but it’s going to take a little while.

Ulli: Yeah, and I do think that will explain that very well. And I’d like to add something to that, which is safety. And in the last few months, as the conversation and the consumer demand and the excitement about peptide has been growing, there has been a lot of press and a lot of articles written about, make sure where the peptides are sourced, that they are. Are done in compliance with US laws and compliance with regulations. Don’t just buy something from the dark net that could come, from someone’s garage who knows where and is manufactured in an environment that is unregulated. And so I think there is this interesting tension in the marketplace between this extraordinary potential that is there.

Ulli: And as, as as supplements for peptides, in contrast with the risk that clearly exists in the marketplace. You need to make sure it’s from a reputable source. It follows all the quality control, it follows all the compliance and all the regulations. So I think that’s that’s where Tester Act Life Sciences with the peptide lab. That we have, we can really play a role because it is imperative to establish trust with the consumer. That this company, this source, this provider can bring reliable, consistent, safe, efficacious product to the marketplace.

Hendrik: I think with the perspective of those two questions that I think gave a really robust answer for. For what people are looking for in this space. I do have another question, which is almost more from the industry side of things, but what does stacking create both as a marketing opportunity as well as a compliance risk? How do you guys see that working out in peptide companies and companies that want to get into the peptide space?

Will: Should I take this one away? I hesitate sometimes to talk about marketing opportunities when we have such a skilled marketing lead in our business. But I think to keep it simple from a marketing perspective, there’s there’s a real consumer benefit of simplicity when you’re taking two very much in-demand items and putting them together for the consumer when the consumer has expressed that they want them. And I think that’s exactly what happens in the case of something like the Wolverine. Stack. And so it, if the consumer is going to go source them independently and you can give them to the consumer together, then naturally that type of bundle is likely to succeed. However, there can be quite a few problems from the manufacturer and channel point of view, which really start at the market level and then flow backwards into the manufacturing supply chain, that really begin.

Navigating Regulatory and Market Dynamics in Peptides

Will: In end and circle around issues of legality from an FDA point of view, if you’re taking two independent things, which might be fine on their own with their own individual regulatory clearance pathways, but then start putting them together, you risk creating, and in this case, may very well breach a boundary where you’re essentially inadvertently. Creating a new drug or what may be considered a new drug under review by the FDA. And nobody wants that because then you’re starting conversations or enforcement risk. That type of question is the type of thing that the FDA and compound pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies have to answer all the time. And here the market’s headed strongly in that direction, has a lot of players doing it. And some of them probably have. On their minds, others aren’t even thinking about it. Just because the consumer wants it doesn’t mean that the players in the channel should jump the gun and deliver it without thinking about what the regulations say.

Will: But then from a practical point of view, you’re also taking a bunch of independent ingredients and in some unknown benchtop or manufacturing areas, you’re opening sealed sanitary containers, blending things together in additional workspaces, steps. Etc. And you introduce the additional possibility of unsanitary conditions and so on. If you have a controlled environment, those risks are low, but just extra steps in the supply chain always introduce additional complications, which no one really likes when you’re in the manufacturing business. But I think those things are secondary compared to the bigger risk. Tesseract doesn’t manufacture peptides. We are not an original manufacturer of peptides. We don’t aspire to that, at least not Anytime soon. We work with the most reputable original manufacturers of peptides in order to make them better, more bioavailable, more differentiated so that the channel can field things that are the absolute best versions of those peptides for the channel and for the end consumer, so that our partners can stand at the top of the market.

Will: But we leave the questions of how they do it so that they do it in the most formal and approved way from a regulatory point of view to the channel, the compound pharmacies, to the doctors and so on, so that everybody plays their role in the appropriate fashion and everyone stays in their lane.

We have regulations for a reason, and those regulations are coming stronger, clearer, over the next couple of months and the next couple of years as the government and the FDA get their arms around the space for good reason., these are These are looking more and more like they should be heavily regulated because they appear to be very powerful compared to certain things like supplements and so on, which certainly have an effect on the body, but probably not in a direct, immediate, consequential way, the way some peptides appear to, even though, as I said before, we’re very early in the phase of studying them rigorously under clinical trial models.

Will: I want to emphasize and this should probably come out again in our discussion if we were here for a while talking about these things that people pay a lot of money for these and they’re in very small doses, micrograms and so on doses. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Should highly, highly, highly caution people against taking. More than a doctor’s recommended dose of these. People supplements and drugs and so on, you hear a lot of locker room discussions and anecdotal, stories and so on about people taking more than a recommended dose of something. And I think people just by human nature are prone to that, particularly, weekend warriors and athletes and those of us who are aging and looking for faster recovery and things like that. This is not the time and place and method to experiment, particularly when research is limited. That is not what anyone at Tesseract is about. That’s not what anyone who is a professional in this industry, I think, is about or would ever recommend.

So a word of caution is always, I think, well placed.

Ulli: And I’m not aging. I just want to say that for the record, because we’re talking about this a lot. I’m not. I am Determined, I’m not. No, we’ll later we’ll M and I. I have decided. Yeah, well, if since Uli is not aging later, Stephen, you should ask her which peptide she’s using to achieve. I this is a good question because this the only peptide I’m using is currently, I think, one of the very, very few peptides that are available in the supplement space for oral Consumption and that is glutathione.

Ulli: And so well knows this, but Tesseract Life Sciences has truly been a pioneer in that space encapsulating and deploying our intellectual property on S acetylglutathione, which is highly regarded for its properties and its medical grade, so it crosses the blood-brain barrier, it has increased. Incredible, incredible benefits. And it is a tripeptide. Therefore it’s a it’s a great space for it to be in the conversation as well.

Comparison at a glance