Reading the evidence base honestly

Two entries can sit side by side in this catalog with wildly different amounts of evidence behind them. One may have tens of thousands of trial participants; the next may have a vendor product page. Here is how we distinguish them.

Why a flat list misleads

A grid of cards implies parity. Every card is the same size, uses the same typography, and sits in the same row — so semaglutide and a four-letter blend name with no literature at all appear, visually, to be peers.

They are not remotely peers. Flattening that difference is the single most common failure in peptide reference material, and it is usually not deliberate — it is just what happens when you put everything in one table and stop there.

Tier 1 — Approved medicines

These have completed controlled human trials and been reviewed by at least one major regulator. There is a label, a known safety profile, documented adverse events, and published dose-finding data.

Examples in this catalog: semaglutide, tirzepatide, tesamorelin, bremelanotide (PT-141), thymalfasin (Thymosin Alpha-1), somatropin. For anything in this tier, the authoritative source is the regulator-approved label — not us.

Tier 2 — Clinical-stage candidates

In active human trials, with published results, but not approved. The mechanism is usually well characterised and the human data is real — but incomplete, and the safety picture is still forming.

Examples: retatrutide, survodutide, mazdutide, cagrilintide, elamipretide (SS-31), cibinetide (Ara-290). Trial results here are genuine evidence, but a phase-two readout is not an approval, and a meaningful fraction of compounds at this stage never reach one.

Tier 3 — Preclinical only

Cell-culture and animal studies exist, sometimes a substantial body of them, but no meaningful human trial data. This is the largest tier in the catalog and where the most careful reading is required.

Examples: BPC-157, TB-500, MOTS-C, FOXO4-DRI, PNC-27, and the great majority of compounds indexed here. A striking rodent result is a hypothesis about humans, not a finding about humans. The attrition rate between the two is famously brutal.

A specific sub-case deserves naming. The Khavinson-tradition "peptide bioregulators" — Cartalax, Chonluten, Cortagen, Livagen, Ovagen, Pinealon, Prostamax, Testagen, Vesugen, Vilon — form a large, internally consistent literature originating almost entirely from a single research network at the St. Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology, much of it published in Russian. Some of it is peer-reviewed and PubMed-indexed. What is largely absent is independent replication outside that network. That is not an accusation of anything; it is a material fact about how much weight the evidence can bear, and we label it accordingly.

Tier 4 — Vendor-defined names

Product names, not characterised compounds. There is no peer-reviewed literature under the name itself, and composition often varies between sellers.

Examples: GLOW, KLOW, Tri-Heal, Neuroxelin, Adamax. Each is a combination of components that may individually have research behind them — but the blend as sold has never been studied as a blend. Component evidence does not transfer to a mixture: interactions, ratios, and stability in a shared vial are all unaddressed.

"Adamax" illustrates a further problem. Different vendors use the name for two entirely unrelated things — a Semax-family analog, or a growth-hormone-secretagogue blend. When the name itself is ambiguous, no claim attached to it can be verified.

The classification error worth catching

Some widely marketed "research peptides" are not peptides. They are small molecules, which is a different class of substance with different pharmacology entirely.

SLU-PP-332 — a synthetic small-molecule agonist of the estrogen-related receptors, developed at Saint Louis University.
5-Amino-1MQ — a small-molecule NNMT inhibitor.
AICAR — a nucleotide analog.
L-Carnitine — an amino-acid derivative.
NAD+ — a dinucleotide coenzyme.

We flag these where they appear. Selling a small molecule under a peptide heading is not a trivial mislabel — it changes what the compound plausibly does.

What "n.a." means here

Where a field is marked unavailable or a description says a claim is unverified, that is a deliberate statement, not an unfinished entry. It means we searched, did not find a source we were willing to stand behind, and declined to fill the space with something that merely sounded plausible.

We would rather show you a gap than paper over one.

Cellaire Labs publishes research and educational reference material only. Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to administer any substance to a human or animal.