Sam Sulek’s NewBioRx Sells “Research Only” Retatrutide. A NewBioRx-Branded Site Showed You How to Inject It, Until This Weekend.

Sam Sulek’s peptide company sold retatrutide in a pre-filled pen “for research use only,” while a site under the same NewBioRx branding walked you through putting it in your body. On Sunday afternoon the pen vanished from the store and the instructions site went dark. The vials are still for sale.

I inject Zepbound every week, the branded GLP-1, the weekly shot in the abdomen, and it has done for me about what it was supposed to. So I read about retatrutide the way a lot of people on these drugs do. Reta is the next molecule up, Eli Lilly’s triple agonist, and in the trials it has produced the biggest weight losses anyone in the class has published. I know bodybuilders who swear by it, and by peptides in general, and part of me would love to try it too. The FOMO is real.

I have not, for two fairly boring reasons. The first is that I like following the rules, mostly so I do not get into trouble. The second is that as impressive as reta sounds, it makes me nervous about my heart: its glucagon arm nudges up your resting heart rate, and that is not a side effect I feel like volunteering for. So I stayed a curious spectator, which is how I ended up looking at where people actually buy the stuff. That is where it got strange.

What bothered me about Sam Sulek’s company, NewBioRx, was not that a fitness YouTuber started a peptide brand. That happens about once a month now. It was the shape of this one. Sulek, who has one of the biggest fitness audiences on YouTube, co-owns a company that, until this weekend, sold retatrutide in a pre-filled injection pen labeled for research use only. And a second website, under the same NewBioRx branding, taught you how to inject that pen into your body and how many units to dial for each dose.

One site sold the pen while swearing no human may ever use it. The other assumed a human was using it. Those two facts are the whole story. Everything below is documentation.

One update before the documentation. Everything described here was still live on Sunday morning, August 16, when I checked one more time. By that afternoon the pen’s product page was returning a 404 and the pen was gone from the store catalog. The instructions site, all of it, had been replaced with a NewBioRx-branded “Coming soon” page. The retatrutide vials are still for sale. I do not know why the pen and the tutorial came down, and I am not going to guess. Where a page is now gone, the links in this post go to archive.org copies saved on August 15, three days after Eli Lilly sued six retatrutide sellers.

A $285 retatrutide pen that wasn’t for humans

Here is the product. On newbiorx.com you could, until Sunday, buy a “RETATRUTIDE RX MULTIDOSE 16mg PEN,” SKU RXP0170, for $285. Three milliliters. “Pens are made custom to order.” “Instructions included.” “Pens ship in cooler with ice.”

Directly beneath that, the disclaimer: “This PRODUCT IS INTENDED AS A RESEARCH CHEMICAL ONLY. Bodily introduction of any kind into humans or animals is strictly prohibited by law.” The same block states the product “is not a drug, food, or cosmetic.” The shipping page says the same thing in plainer words: “These products are not intended for human dosing, injections, or ingestion.”

It is easy to skim past how absurd this is. A pen injector is not laboratory equipment. Nobody pipettes out of a pre-filled, dial-a-dose auto-injector. The object has one engineering purpose, which is delivering a measured dose under the skin of a person who is holding it against their own body. There is no assay that begins with priming a pen. The ice pack it shipped on was not for a centrifuge. It was for a refrigerator, next to somebody’s insulin.

Retatrutide, for context, is Lilly’s investigational triple agonist. It works on the GIP, GLP-1, and glucagon receptors at once, it is in Phase 3 trials for obesity and diabetes, and it is approved nowhere in the world. Not the US, not anywhere. Because there is no approved retatrutide product, anything being sold to ordinary buyers as finished retatrutide sits outside the legitimate, approved supply chain. The FDA has said as much in about the bluntest language it uses: “Retatrutide and cagrilintide cannot be used in compounding under federal law. Additionally, these are not components of FDA-approved drugs and have not been found safe and effective for any condition.”

There is also the question of who stands behind what is inside the pen. Federal law does have two compounding pathways, under sections 503A and 503B, each with its own requirements and oversight. Retatrutide does not qualify for either, which is the point the FDA was making above. And NewBioRx says in its own materials that it is neither a 503A pharmacy nor a 503B facility anyway. So a custom-filled pen of an unapproved drug was being assembled to order with, by the company’s own account, no pharmacy license, no 503B registration, and no pharmacist’s name attached to the contents. Instructions included, though.

The website that gave it away

Those instructions had a home: howtotakepeptides.com. Every page there was headed with the word “Instructions” beside the NewBioRx logo. The retatrutide page described the product as a “20 mg pen, once weekly, subcutaneous,” which is a description of a weekly self-injection into the fat under your skin, not anything you would ever say about a lab reagent. It laid out a conversion from milligrams of drug to units on the pen’s dial, running from a low dose up to a high one it labeled “two shots.” There was also a number that did not line up: the guide was written for a 20 mg pen, the pen the store sold was 16 mg, and the product page’s own web address said 15. The same brand could not agree with itself about what was in the pen its customers were being taught to inject.

Below that sat a section headed “How To Give Yourself a Shot.” Twelve photographs walked a person from washing their hands through priming the pen, wiping the skin, pushing the needle in, and counting to ten before pulling it out. I am telling you this existed, not repeating it. Nothing about this operation should be anyone’s dosing source.

Two lines on that page were worth quoting exactly. The first was the dosing guidance: “Stay on the dose set by whoever is managing your medical care.” Notice it did not say your doctor. It said whoever. The second appeared further down, on the same page as the needle photos: “For research use only. Not for human or animal consumption.” A step-by-step self-injection tutorial and a not-for-humans disclaimer, published together, under one logo. I did not believe it until I read it twice.

The storefront never linked to the instructions site, but connecting them does not take much. The instructions site carried the NewBioRx logo, not a lookalike. The “Coming soon” page that replaced it still does. The instruction pages covered the same lineup of pens NewBioRx sold, one guide per product. I looked for the link to the instructions site on the store, in its sitemap, and in the videos promoting the brand, and could not find it once. However the link reached buyers, it was never out in the open. I have not seen ownership papers, so I will not tell you they are one legal entity. But the logo and the matching catalog were public, and they point the same way: one site that said never inject this, and another under the same brand that said here is how.

There was also an obvious commercial effect. A research-only pen that a customer cannot figure out how to use is less useful to that customer. The tutorial made the pen usable, and a usable product is easier to sell.

This looks a lot like what Eli Lilly is suing over

On August 12, 2026, Lilly filed six lawsuits against US sellers of retatrutide: Aesthetic Envy, Astra Peptides, Legendary Peptides, Striker Pharmacy, Texas Peptides, and Lone Star Peptide. Several of them ship under a “research use only” label, the same framing NewBioRx uses. Alongside the suits, Lilly said it had referred more than 200 individuals and entities to the FDA, the Justice Department, and state attorneys general, and reported more than 14,000 websites and social posts. Its chief medical officer, David Hyman, did not hedge: “What is being sold on the black market is not a medicine, it is entirely unverified, unapproved and not worth the risk.”

Lilly’s complaints leaned on the sellers’ own websites, the dosing calculators and the week-by-week escalation schedules. A genuine research supplier does not publish a week-four titration schedule, because a lab studying a compound in a dish does not titrate a dose upward over a person’s month. Humans do. Lilly’s argument, in effect, is that the moment you publish dosing guidance for bodies, your “research use only” label is a fiction, you know it, and your own website is the confession. NewBioRx had all of it, live and public until this weekend: a milligrams-to-units conversion, a twelve-step self-injection guide, “once weekly, subcutaneous.” It is the same kind of material Lilly put in front of the court.

NewBioRx is not one of the six defendants. Nobody has sued Sulek’s company, and I am not claiming otherwise, or that anyone is about to. The point is the pattern. Read Lilly’s complaints and the resemblance is hard to miss: a research-only disclaimer on one page, dosing instructions for a person on another. If that is a problem for six peptide sellers in Texas and elsewhere, I do not know why it would be fine for one with a famous co-owner.

Four days after the lawsuits, the pen disappeared

The pages came down while I was finishing this story. I had not contacted NewBioRx, and I do not know who took the pages down or why. Lilly filed on Wednesday, August 12, and some of the defendants pulled their retatrutide pages within days. When I checked Lone Star Peptide’s shop this weekend, every GLP-1 it had sold was gone. NewBioRx’s pages did not change. On Saturday, three days after the suits, I archived the pen page and the retatrutide instructions page, both fully live. On Sunday morning I checked again: pen for sale at $285, add-to-cart working, tutorial up. My capture of the tutorial is stamped 11:29 a.m.

By 2:42 that afternoon, howtotakepeptides.com had stopped serving its guides. Every page of the site now shows a single “Coming soon” screen, still carrying the NewBioRx logo: “We’re putting the finishing touches on our peptide guides. Check back shortly.” Minutes later I checked the store. The pen’s product page returns a 404, and the pen is missing from all six pages of the catalog.

The rest of the catalog did not change. Every other pen the brand sells is still listed, the BPC-157, the tesamorelin, the blends. The retatrutide vials, 16 mg and 30 mg, are still in stock with working add-to-cart buttons. Of everything I checked, the two things that disappeared this weekend were the retatrutide pen and the site that taught you to inject it.

The timing is on the record: the pen survived the lawsuits by four days and came off the store the same afternoon the tutorial went dark. Google has not caught up either. As I write this, a search of the site still lists every guide, each title ending “Instructions — NewBioRx,” and Google’s snippet for the retatrutide page still describes “a once-a-week weight-loss and metabolic peptide.” Those listings will fade as Google catches up. The pages as they were are archived, and the archives are what this post links to.

The famous face, and the doctor in the promotion

I should say plainly that I like Sam Sulek. I have watched plenty of his gym videos, and I admire his dedication to training and even daily cardio. Whatever you make of the physique, the training behind it is not faked. The peptide world is full of genuinely selfish grifters, and I do not think he is one of them. That is part of why this is worth writing about. NewBioRx is not some anonymous scam run by people hiding their faces. It is a likable, disciplined guy’s brand, and it is still one of the most obvious examples of the “peptide business” I have come across.

I will also be straight about my reaction to that business, because it is not neutral. It disgusts me that there is money to be made in this at all. People are profiting from selling an unapproved drug under a label that looks designed to distance the seller from human use, and doing it in the open. Liking the guy whose face is on it does not change that.

Sulek is not hiding any of this, which is almost the strangest part. On his own channel, on camera, he says: “as a disclaimer, I am a co-owner of this brand. So, you know, keep that financial motivation in context when I talk about this.” Credit where it is due, that is more than most influencers disclose. Then, in the same video, he explains the business model better than I could. Peptides, he says, sit in “this unregulated gray area” where “everything’s being sold for research purposes only, so they’re not being held to the same quality standards as a company that’s selling things that are FDA approved and regulated.” He is telling you, in his own words, that the products are not held to the quality standards FDA-approved drugs are, and that the research-only framing is why. Then he sold you the pen. He asked his audience to keep the financial motivation in context. Consider this post the context.

A photo posted to the Sulek fan sub shows a printed letter in his voice that the poster says ships in the box. In the letter as photographed, Sulek writes that he “linked up with Dr. Connelly” to “build something that actually holds weight,” that “New England Biologics came from that,” and that “this isn’t some side hustle; I am all the way in.” New England Biologics is the earlier name NewBioRx grew out of, and its old domain, neb.co, still redirects to the NewBioRx storefront. Dr. Connelly is Thomas Connelly, the company’s CEO of record, and a Beverly Hills cosmetic dentist.

There is also a doctor attached to the promotion. In his NewBioRx promotion, Sulek tags Dr. Arnold Mahesan, a Beverly Hills physician who is board-certified in OB-GYN and reproductive endocrinology and runs a fertility and IVF practice. Reproductive endocrinology is an endocrine subspecialty, but it is fertility medicine, a long way from the metabolic and obesity field where a drug like retatrutide lives. Mahesan is not listed on the NewBioRx storefront, and I could not document any formal role for him there, so I am not going to assign him one. What is on the record is his own Instagram, where he posts against peptide misinformation. One reel this spring: “The peptide space is exploding, and so is the misinformation. Everyone wants to be an ‘expert.’ Medicine matters. Credentials matter. Evidence matters.” Those are fair points. The question I could not answer is the narrow one: what, if any, is his connection to a retatrutide business, and what does a fertility specialty have to do with it?

Whatever the “research use only” disclaimer is intended to do, its practical effect is to put the risk back on the buyer. If a dose turns out wrong, there is no pharmacist on the hook, because the seller says it is not a pharmacy. There is no manufacturer standing behind the molecule, because the drug is approved nowhere. The doctor from the reel has no role I can find at the company. And the disclaimer insists you were never supposed to inject it, so even the site that taught you how is covered. The risk ends up on whoever is holding the pen.

My problem here is not the molecule. I said at the top that I am cautious about retatrutide for my own reasons, but that is a personal call about a drug, and reta may still turn out to be the best of this class once Lilly finishes the trials. That is a reason to wait for the approved pen, not to buy one from a company that swears in writing it never sold you a drug. I do not know what is actually in a NewBioRx pen, and neither does anyone who bought one, which is the entire problem. What I know is who answers for mine. When the same brand’s logo was on the injection tutorial, “research use only” was a way to sell the shot and disown it in the same breath. Taking the tutorial down does not change what it was for.