Sam Sulek's peptide company sold a $285 "research use only" retatrutide pen, and a site with the same branding showed you how to inject it. On Sunday both disappeared.
I inject Zepbound every week, so I understand the retatrutide FOMO. Reta is Eli Lilly's triple agonist, the next molecule up from tirzepatide, still in Phase 3 trials and approved nowhere in the world. That is what got me looking at where people actually buy it.
Sam Sulek, one of the biggest fitness YouTubers, says on camera that he co-owns a peptide company called NewBioRx. The storefront sold a $285 pre-filled retatrutide pen under the standard research-chemical disclaimer: "Bodily introduction of any kind into humans or animals is strictly prohibited by law." A second website carrying the NewBioRx logo published a milligrams-to-units conversion table for that pen and a twelve-photo walkthrough titled "How To Give Yourself a Shot." One site swore no human may ever use the product. The other assumed a human was using it.
The timing matters. On August 12, Eli Lilly sued six US sellers of retatrutide, and its complaints lean on exactly this kind of material, the dosing calculators and injection guides, as evidence that a "research use only" label is a fiction. NewBioRx is not one of the six defendants, and nobody has sued Sulek's company. It is the same pattern, though. The FDA has separately said retatrutide cannot legally be used in compounding at all.
Then, on Sunday afternoon, while I was finishing the write-up, the pen's product page went 404 and the entire instructions site was replaced by a NewBioRx-branded "Coming soon" page. The 16 mg and 30 mg vials are still for sale. I don't know who took the pages down or why. I had archived everything first, and the write-up links to the archives.
I documented the whole paper trail, the product pages, the instructions site, the corporate filings, and Sulek's own on-camera explanation that research-only products are not "held to the same quality standards" as FDA-regulated ones, with screenshots: full write-up on my blog with the details.
The disclaimer itself is what bothers me most. It does not describe the product, and the seller's own instructions contradicted it. Its practical effect is that when something goes wrong, the person holding the pen owns the outcome, not the company that sold it. I think that is the real product being sold: deniability. Curious whether anyone here reads "research use only" differently.