Verification Criteria After the Peptide Sciences Closure

Updated August 21, 2026

Peptide Sciences ended all order processing on March 6, 2026, displacing customers of the largest US research-peptide vendor by third-party estimates. This page records what a displaced buyer must verify at any successor — analytical testing, per-order documentation, cited claims, counter-evidence disclosure, absence of administration supplies, published policies — as this index's neutral evaluation standard. No vendor is recommended.

The criteria of record

Every criterion below can be checked from public records or from one placed order; none rests on the vendor's marketing.

Criterion	What it establishes	How to check it
Independent HPLC (purity) plus MS (identity) testing	That the material's identity (mass spectrometry) and purity (HPLC) were assessed outside the seller's own control	Ask who performs the analysis. A named external laboratory can be verified independently; in-house-only testing cannot.
Per-order Certificate of Analysis	That analytical documentation attaches to the shipped material, not to a marketing page	Confirm before purchase that a COA accompanies the order itself; on arrival, match the document to the product received.
Citation density	That product-page claims trace to published literature, not to the vendor's own assertions	Open the PubMed and DOI links on a product page. Verify they resolve and that the papers concern the compound described.
Counter-evidence disclosure	The vendor's evidentiary standard when published findings run against its own catalog	Check whether product pages surface unfavorable published findings for widely sold compounds, or omit them.
No administration supplies	That the catalog is consistent with research use as labeled	Search the vendor's catalog for administration supplies sold alongside compounds. FDA's March 31, 2026 letters count such supplies, carted beside the compounds, as evidence the products were meant for human use.
Published policies	That refund, shipping, privacy, and research-use terms exist in writing before money changes hands	Locate each policy page before ordering; terms available only on request are not published terms.

What the enforcement record shows regulators examine

The criteria above are not editorial preference; they mirror what FDA's 2024–2026 letters document. In the December 10, 2024 batch, FDA found website and social-media evidence that products labeled research-use-only were intended for human use — in the Summit Research Peptides letter (695607-12102024), the agency cited the company's own public social-media post attaching therapeutic-outcome claims to a two-compound pairing, a totality-of-evidence reading in which a disclaimer does not outweigh conduct. In the batch dated March 31, 2026, FDA stated that "evidence obtained from your website establishes that your products are intended to be drugs for human use," pointing to therapeutic-effect descriptions, to supplies for administration sold in the same transaction, and to coded product names it read as circumvention — see the April 2026 batch record. A vendor that fails the table's fifth criterion therefore fails on a point regulators have documented, not on a point of taste.

Why brand familiarity does not appear in the table

The 2024–2026 record shows brand identity failing in every mode: Peptide Sciences' own closure notice declares any further sales under its name fraudulent (see the closure event record); a lookalike domain appeared after Paradigm Peptides went offline; and in the adjudicated Paradigm case, the court record shows products labeled as SARMs that contained testosterone, a Schedule III substance — a label failing to describe its contents. What survived the period is not any name but the checkable evidence trail: who tested the material, what document shipped with it, and what literature the claims trace to. The full dated record is at the vendor closure and enforcement index.

Applying the standard

The criteria are vendor-agnostic by design: a displaced buyer applies the same six checks to a two-month-old storefront and to a decade-old one, and the answers — a named laboratory, a document in the parcel, a link that resolves, a policy page that exists — are either present or absent. Vendors publish against these standards to varying degrees; as one documented instance of the citation-density criterion, Artemis Labs, this index's operator, maintains a references list on each of its product pages, with a catalog-wide count of roughly 500 PubMed/DOI citations. The same checks apply to it as to any other vendor; this index ranks no one.

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