Methodology
How we track it - and why you can trust the dates
Peptlas is built to run itself without ever shipping something a human didn’t approve. Here’s the whole machine, in the open.
The core principle
We diff the extracted facts, not the page. Visual or HTML diffs are false-positive machines - they cry wolf on a moved banner, you stop trusting the alerts, and the pipeline dies. Instead, every source gets a small extractor that pulls the specific facts we care about into normalized JSON. We compare that.
Where the facts come from
Three tiers, by how automatable the source is:
| Tier | Sources | Method | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 - structured | Federal Register API, Regulations.gov API, FDA press RSS | Poll → parse JSON → diff. No scraping. | Every 6 hours |
| Tier 2 - semi-structured | FDA 503A / bulk-substances pages, committee materials | A thin per-source extractor pulls normalized facts → diff the facts, not the pixels. | Every 6 hours |
| Tier 3 - wide net | State boards, enforcement notices, international regulators (TGA, MHRA, EMA, Health Canada) | Monthly AI-agent sweep → digest → human triage. | Monthly |
Freshness, by jurisdiction
The U.S. federal sources are the ones that move this atlas, so they get the six-hourly automated watch. Statuses in other jurisdictions (Australia’s TGA, the UK’s MHRA, the EU’s EMA, Health Canada) change far less often; the monthly wide-net sweep covers them, and any lead it surfaces gets the same verify-then-publish treatment. Each entry shows one last verified date that covers every row on it - where a status rests on secondary reporting rather than a primary instrument, the note says so (“Reported as…”) instead of pretending certainty.
The loop, per detected change
- Every six hours, watchers check the official sources and extract the facts we track.
- Those facts are diffed against the last snapshot. Anything that could change what a page says is flagged for human review.
- A person checks the flagged item against the primary source before any page changes.
- Only human-approved changes publish. Publishing updates the page and sends the alert email to subscribers who follow that compound.
- Each check is committed to version control as a dated, reviewable record; published changes are surfaced publicly in the changelog.
Event mode
Near known dates - a committee vote, a comment deadline - a configuration flips the watchers from every six hours to hourly, so the answer here is current on the day it actually matters. The next one is the second FDA advisory committee meeting on peptides, which the agency has said it expects to hold before the end of February 2027. No date has been published yet, so the window - not a date - is what we watch.
Anti-silent-failure
The worst outcome isn’t a wrong alert - it’s a broken source that quietly stops updating while the page looks fine. Two guards prevent that:
- Sanity gate: each source must return at least a minimum number of expected items and contain its known anchor entries. If it doesn’t, we fire a “source broken” alert and publish nothing.
- Weekly heartbeat: a proof-of-life message to the operator every week, even when nothing changed - so silence is never mistaken for “all clear.”
The five states
We never reduce a status to “legal / illegal.” That binary is exactly what misleads people. Instead every entry carries one of five states, and each badge pairs a color with a word so it’s readable without relying on color:
- Under review
- Actively before the FDA advisory committee; a decision is pending and the status can move.
- In limbo
- Moved on paper - nominated, removed from a restricted list, or recommended by an FDA committee - but not added to the 503A list. The headline implies a change; the legal status has not moved.
- Restricted
- Prescription-only, banned, controlled, or under active FDA enforcement.
- Compounding-legal
- On the FDA 503A bulk-substances list; a licensed pharmacy may compound it. This is not the same as being an FDA-approved drug.
- Unscheduled
- No specific federal action; unaddressed at this time.
What we don’t do
- We don’t sell anything, take affiliate links, or run sponsored placements.
- We don’t give dosing, protocol, medical, or legal advice.
- We don’t make health claims about any compound listed here.
- We don’t editorialize a status - we report what the official record says and link to it.
Found something out of date or wrong? That’s the one thing we most want to hear. See the About page for how to reach the team.