An approved product has a named use
At this desk, FDA stands for the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency responsible for reviewing medicines.
As of September 2026, the peptide products Ozempic and Wegovy contain semaglutide, while Mounjaro and Zepbound contain tirzepatide; these products have FDA approval.
Semaglutide is used in Ozempic products for type 2 diabetes and Wegovy products for weight management.
Mounjaro contains tirzepatide for treating type 2 diabetes; Zepbound contains it for weight management.
Approval belongs to a product and its listed uses, rather than to peptide therapy as a whole.
Look inside the source drawer
The product’s label is the place to check what the FDA approved it for.
Made to order has conditions
Preparing medicine to suit a patient’s particular needs is called compounding; a pharmacist or doctor does this work.
As of September 2026, an ordinary licensed pharmacy can make medicine for you under federal compounding rules, using a valid prescription in your name.
The finished medicine has no FDA approval.
The rules also limit which ingredients the pharmacy can use and when it can make a copy of an available approved medicine.
For an ordinary pharmacy, a raw medicine ingredient must meet the national drug-quality standard that applies to it.
When that standard does not exist, the pharmacy must use an ingredient found in an approved drug or on FDA’s list of allowed raw ingredients.
Ask the pharmacist which ingredient rule allows this medicine and what medical need it meets for you.
Ask the prescriber to explain any change from the ready-made product; the made-to-order medicine page below explains the copy limits.
A prescription alone does not answer whether an ingredient can be used under the compounding rules.
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FDA rules limit both the ingredients and the copying of ready-made medicines.
A laboratory-only label is not medicine approval
A label saying ‘for research use only’ means the product is labelled for laboratory work rather than treatment of patients.
As of September 2026, FDA letters say sellers still break federal drug law if they promote unapproved products for human treatment under those labels.
BPC-157 and retatrutide are peptide names found online; neither had an FDA-approved US medicine in September 2026.
There is no FDA-approved use for BPC-157 to name here.
Researchers are studying the experimental medicine retatrutide for long-term weight management.
As of September 2026, FDA says federal law bars the use of retatrutide as a compounding ingredient.
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These are product-specific findings, not an official list covering every peptide.
A code is not an approval
A National Drug Code, shortened to NDC, is the number for finding a drug product in FDA’s directory.
As of September 2026, FDA says approval cannot be inferred from a product’s NDC listing.
Ask for the approved product name and label, rather than accepting the code as the answer.
Look inside the source drawer
Finding a product by its drug code does not show that the FDA checked and approved it.