Martin Shkreli sees Silicon Valley’s peptide obsession as a “delusion,” firing back at Superpower co-founder and peptide advocate Max Marchione in a podcast debate.

The Debate

Shkreli, who spent twenty years in pharma and made his career evaluating pharmaceutical compounds, says the whole category fails basic science since peptides break down in the body in seconds or minutes.

Without a known target, a binding mechanism, and real clinical data, he argues you don’t have a drug.

“If your drug has never been tested, there is a reason,” he wrote in an X post. “The reason is not that you are a biopharmaceutical genius who has found something cool that everyone else missed.”

Marchione, who founded a health optimization platform that already sells peptides and is building out its offerings, fired back on X and in the TBPN debate.

What Are Peptides

Peptides, such as insulin, are small proteins that have been used in medicine for decades.

GLP-1 weight-loss drugs from Eli Lilly and Co. (NASDAQ:LLY) and Novo Nordisk (NYSE:NVO) are modified peptides.

The peptides driving the current craze go a lot further.

Compounds like BPC-157 and thymosin alpha-1 are manufactured in Chinese labs, sold online as “research chemicals,” and injected by Silicon Valley founders and biohackers chasing everything from gut healing to sex drive to better eye contact.

Joe Rogan calls his regimen the “wolverine stack,” yet most have never been through a proper human trial.

Peptides aren’t random synthetic chemicals but endogenous molecules your body already produces, uses, and clears, which gives them a fundamentally different risk profile than a novel drug.

The real reason most haven’t been through FDA trials isn’t that they don’t work.

It’s that many can’t be patented, so pharma has no commercial incentive to fund the approval pathway.

Marchione pointed to ketamine, once dismissed as just an anesthetic, which became one of the most important breakthroughs in depression treatment.

RFK Jr. Steps In

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised to “end the war on peptides” and indicated action would be taken to make them more accessible.

The FDA has not taken any action yet, but if RFK Jr. gets his way, the compounds Shkreli calls delusion are about to become a lot more available.

A Polymarket contract on whether the FDA approves Lilly’s retatrutide, a next-generation peptide for obesity that has had excellent trial results, this year, sits at 23%. The market has very little liquidity.

Lilly still has seven Phase 3 readouts pending and hasn’t filed for approval. Twenty-three percent might be generous given the timeline, despite RFK’s support.

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