Key takeaways:

• Several members of the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee have industry connections or run pharmacies or clinics specializing in peptides.
• The group will meet later this month to discuss peptides.

The FDA has listed its advisory members for the committee that will discuss peptides in late July.

Owais Durrani, DO, an emergency medicine physician in Houston, previously wrote for Healio that “some of the most transformative drugs in modern medicine are peptides,” including insulin and semaglutide. While “the science of peptides is real, serious and worth pursuing,” Durrani wrote, the current system is messy: “a multi-billion-dollar market, a gray zone of unregulated suppliers, a regulatory system under political pressure, and real people spending real money on compounds that, for most of them, will produce nothing at all.”

The FDA has named advisory members for the committee that will discuss peptides in late July. Image: Adobe Stock New members and conflicts

The Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee members now include Takyiah Stevenson, PharmD, as the designated federal officer and Gabriel Alizaidy, MD, MS; Asare B. Christian, MD, MPH, ABPMR, ABAARM; Timothy D. Fensky, RPh, DPh FACA; Robert Harshbarger, III, PharmD, FACA; Melissa Loseke, DO; Haleem Mohammed, MD, MBA; Gerald E. Morris, MD, MPH, ABOM; David D. Pope, PharmD; Elizabeth Rebello, RPh, MD, FASA, CPPS, CMQ; Brian Serumaga, PhD; Joshua Starbuck, MD, IFMCP; Kris Wusterhausen, DO; and the nonvoting industry representative Donnette D. Staas, PhD.

But some have raised questions about several of the new committee members’ potential conflicts of interest. According to reporting from the Associated Press, the new panel “includes more than a half-dozen panelists who run clinics, online businesses or pharmacies specializing in peptides.”

For example, Alizaidy, who has thousands of social media followers, charges $500 for “‘peptide and hormone’ consultations, including advice on ‘where to safely get each peptide or compound,’” according to the AP. Additionally, Mohammad — chief medical officer at Gameday Men’s Health — heads Florida clinics that sell injections of testosterone, vitamins and peptides, according to the AP.

Notably, Harshbarger, a Republican state senator for Tennessee, “has multiple connections to the industry,” according to the AP. Harshbarger works as a pharmacist in a family business that sells compounded drugs for pain, longevity, weight loss and more. In 2025, his mother, pharmacist and U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tennessee, sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “calling on him to relax FDA restrictions on a half-dozen peptides,” according to the AP.

Durrani told Healio that the timing of the new appointments was concerning.

“A month’s notice ahead of a meeting that could reshape access to seven widely used peptides is a tight runway for the public, clinicians and even other committee members to properly vet the new panelists’ backgrounds. Advisory committees work best when there’s time for scrutiny before high-stakes votes, not after,” he said.

But he also said that the public should be concerned “not about any one individual so much as the pattern,” because “when a majority of new appointees have direct financial or clinical ties to peptide-selling businesses, that’s a structural conflict-of-interest problem, not a personal one.”

“These aren’t accusations of bad faith. It’s the well-established reason FDA advisory panels are supposed to skew toward independent experts. The concerning part is what it signals about how this panel’s composition was assembled relative to prior iterations, which leaned more heavily on university-based dermatology, anesthesiology and pharmacy compounding experts,” Durrani said. “This is worth watching not just for peptides, specifically, but as a test case for how advisory committee composition and evidence review interact when there’s public pressure from the top of HHS. The outcome here will likely set a template for future reviews.”

Kennedy has faced criticism for reshuffling other key committees. In June 2025, he removed all 17 members of a CDC advisory committee that is instrumental in developing federal vaccine recommendations. And in May 2026, Kennedy fired the chair and vice chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which creates clinical recommendations for preventive medicine.

Future peptides discussion

The committee will meet July 23-24 to discuss peptides. According to the FDA, the following peptides — in both free base and acetate forms — will be part of the conversation:

• BPC-157 for ulcerative colitis;
• emideltide for chronic insomnia, narcolepsy and opioid withdrawal;
• epitalon for insomnia;
• KPV for inflammatory conditions and wound healing;
• MOTs-C for osteoporosis and obesity;
• Semax for migraine, cerebral ischemia and trigeminal neuralgia; and
• TB-500 for wound healing.

Durrani said that “peptides like BPC-157, TB-500, and similar compounds are being marketed well ahead of the evidence,” considering that “most haven’t been through controlled human trials, and FDA’s own staff review reportedly found insufficient data to support their safety and efficacy for compounding.”

“Primary care physicians are going to get more questions from patients who’ve seen these on social media or heard Secretary Kennedy discuss them personally,” Durrani said. “The most useful thing a PCP can do is separate three very different buckets in the conversation: FDA-approved peptide drugs like semaglutide, peptides under active regulatory review like these seven, and gray-market ‘research use only’ products with zero oversight. Patients often don’t realize those are three completely different risk profiles.”

For more information:

Owais Durrani, DO, can be reached at primarycare@healio.com.