Storage and handling of prescribed peptide medication, per label

Two peptides on this site have FDA labels, and labels are where storage rules live. This page puts the three relevant labels side by side, exactly as written, for people who have been prescribed one of these products. It is not a guide to storing anything else, and the last section explains why.

The labels, side by side

Reading the pattern

Three things recur across labels for injectable peptides, and they are worth understanding because they are why the rules are what they are.

Light. Peptides degrade under light. All three labels say protect from light; the Egrifta labels say to do it by leaving the vial in its box.

Preservative. Sterile water has no preservative, so a vial reconstituted with it (Egrifta SV) is a one-time solution: use it, discard the rest. Bacteriostatic water contains benzyl alcohol, which suppresses microbial growth for a limited period, so a vial reconstituted with it (Egrifta WR) can be entered repeatedly for a labelled number of days, 7 in this case. The number of days is a tested value for that formulation. It is not a general property of bacteriostatic water.

Temperature. Both Egrifta formulations are room-temperature products before reconstitution, which surprises people who assume every peptide needs a refrigerator. The label is the authority, not the assumption. The SV label goes further and says do not refrigerate the reconstituted solution.

What the Egrifta and Vyleesi labels do not cover

A compounded tesamorelin, a compounded bremelanotide, or anything sold as a research chemical. The labels describe the tested stability of specific formulations with specific excipients, fills and diluents. Change any of those and the data no longer apply. A compounding pharmacy assigns its own beyond-use date under USP General Chapter 797, based on the preparation and its sterility risk category, and prints it on the label with the storage condition. That label governs.

If a pharmacy-dispensed vial arrived without a beyond-use date or a storage instruction, that is a question for the pharmacy before use, not a gap to fill from this page. If it arrived with a number of days rather than a date, ask for the date. The pharmacy vetting checklist on our compounding site covers what a proper label shows.

The countdown

The storage-life countdown embedded above takes the beyond-use date from your pharmacy label and counts down to it, optionally showing how much of the labelled window has passed since you opened or reconstituted the vial. It performs no other calculation: it does not estimate a date from a storage rule, does not convert between conditions, and does not do reconstitution or dose arithmetic. For the arithmetic on a pharmacy-dispensed vial whose label gives a diluent volume, the reconstitution tool on the calculator site handles it and pre-fills nothing.

Travel and temperature excursions

The Egrifta labels permit excursions to 15 to 30 C for the unreconstituted vial. That is the manufacturer's tested tolerance for that product; it says nothing about a compounded vial. For any pharmacy-dispensed preparation, the pharmacy that assigned the beyond-use date is the party that can say what an excursion does to it. Ask, and if the answer is uncertain, the conservative course is the one every label implies: when in doubt, discard.