A consumer tech VC confessed to me over breakfast that he was injecting himself with an experimental peptide protocol. His grey market tincture could soon be mainstream.
Peptides—the tiny protein fragments that users inject to try to speed up recovery, boost energy, or slow aging—are all the rage. And two years after compounding pharmacies turned “cheap Ozempic” into a multibillion-dollar shadow industry, the FDA is deciding whether to hand the same playbook to a whole new category: wellness peptides. On July 23 and 24, the agency’s compounding advisory committee will review seven peptides—including BPC-157 and TB-500, the injectables your favorite biohacker (and RFK Jr.) won’t stop talking about—for possible approval to be legally mixed by specialty pharmacies. If that happens, the people who run telehealth’s biggest growth engine of the last few years are ready.
Start with Hims & Hers. The company built a real business on cheaper, pharmacy-mixed versions of Ozempic and Wegovy, then watched it get squeezed once the FDA declared the supply shortage over and later proposed excluding those drugs from the pharmacy compounding list (a final decision has been pushed to July 30). The company’s stock got hammered several times, forcing Hims to diversify its offerings.
