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01.10.2014

LGD-4033 in web shops is authentic – TB-500 is not

Nowadays chemical athletes use not only anabolic steroids, insulin and growth hormone: more often than you'd expect they also use experimental substances such as SARMs and peptides. But, just like anabolic steroids that don't always contain what the dealer says they do, the same applies to these experimental substances. Ask the biochemists at the German Sport University Cologne. They analysed all doping substances that the German customs seized in the period 2010-2013, and made a number of interesting discoveries.

LGD-4033
The researchers will publish an article soon in the European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology on the results of the analysis of the contents of a jar containing the SARM LGD-4033 manufactured by Uniquemicals. The researchers did indeed find the substance. Click here for more information on LGD-4033.

TB-500
The results of the analysis of a vial of TB-500 produced by the American company DB Genetics were not so impressive [b in the photo below]. According to the manufacturer, the vials contain a peptide that is like a fragment of the larger naturally occurring peptide Thymosin Beta-4.

Put simply: a Thymosin Beta-4 molecule consists of a chain of 43 amino acids [see below]. TB-500 consists of the amino acids 17-23 of the longer chain.

Athletes sometimes use Thymosin Beta-4 to speed up their healing after injuries. Last year the Australian football team Cronulla Sharks received widespread publicity because it was alleged that they had used Thymosin Beta-4 as a doping agent. [theconversation.com 7 March 2013]

But when the researchers analysed the TB-500 it wasn't the TB-500 fragment that they found but the complete Thymosin Beta-4. Whether this means the contents of the vial were more safe or less safe than they should be, we don't know. We don't know what implications this has for the effectiveness of the substance either. But above-board it is not.

Strange stuff
What vial c in the photo above contains the researchers didn't manage to find out. They found a 17,931.84 Dalton protein, and when they examined its structure they discovered that it had been produced using gene technology, and that the production process had gone completely wrong.

"By means of in-gel tryptic digestion and nano-LC HRMS, a 12-kDa thioredoxin-1 tag was identified, which is routinely used as solubility-tag during recombinant protein production", the Germans write. "But as further evaluation of the acquired MS data yielded additional characteristic vector components such as His- and S-tags, a thrombin cleavage site, and remnants of a multiple cloning site, it was assumed that the identified fusion protein is only the result of a failed protein production that was lyophilized and distributed via the black market."

Caveat emptor, dudes.

Source:
Eur J Clin Pharmacol. 2014 Aug 30. [Epub ahead of print].

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