MOTS-c Price: The Cost of a Batch-Tested Vial

The MOTS-c price at the vendor linked below is $75.00 for a 10 mg vial, or $37.50 with the code PEPTIDEDECK. That is $7.50 and $3.75 per labelled milligram. There is one strength, so there is no vial-size comparison to make.

Which makes this a short article about arithmetic and a longer one about denominators. Per labelled milligram is the number every listing quotes. Per milligram of peptide is the number you actually receive, and the gap between them is set by a counterion and a water content figure that most certificates do not report.

MOTS-c price by quantity, before any code

The list price of $75.00 is itself a reduction from a $89.99 reference figure. Quantity tiers apply to the list price: 3 percent off at three vials, 5 percent at five, 10 percent at ten. Those are the published terms, and they are modest.

The last row is an order of magnitude away from the rest of the table. A 10 percent tier on ten vials saves $75.00; the code saves $37.50 on one. Whether the two combine is not stated in the published terms, and this site does not guess at merchant configuration. Add the quantity you want, enter the code, and read the total before paying. The mechanics of that check are in our code page.

Carriage is free above $250. One discounted vial is $37.50, so a single purchase is not close: seven discounted vials at $262.50 would be the first quantity to clear it. At list prices four vials at $300.00 clear it and the five-vial tier at $356.25 clears it, while the three-vial tier at $218.25 does not.

MOTS-c cost without insurance is the only MOTS-c cost there is

The phrase implies a covered price somewhere behind it. There is not one. Insurance reimbursement attaches to products that have been through a marketing application, been granted an authorisation for a stated indication, been assigned a National Drug Code and been accepted onto a formulary at a negotiated rate.

MOTS-c has none of those. It holds no authorisation from the FDA, the EMA or the MHRA, which means no payer has ever priced it, no pharmacy benefit manager has negotiated a rate for it, and no pharmacy can dispense it against a prescription. What is sold is material labelled for laboratory research.

The practical consequence is that the whole retail-versus-covered comparison people run for approved metabolic drugs does not transfer. There is one price, it is paid in full, and the only comparison available is between suppliers on the same terms.

What you paid $3.75 a milligram for is not all peptide

A vial labelled 10 mg contains 10 mg of powder as weighed by the filler. The powder is peptide plus whatever came with it out of purification and lyophilisation. Two contributions are routine and neither is optional.

The first is counterion. Reverse-phase purification of peptides is usually run with trifluoroacetic acid in the mobile phase, and the peptide comes off the column as a TFA salt. MOTS-c is the 16-residue sequence MRWQEMGYIFYPRKLR, with three arginines, one lysine and a free N-terminus against a single glutamate, so it can carry several trifluoroacetate counterions at roughly 114 Da each. Against a peptide mass of approximately 2,174 Da, three to four counterions is on the order of 14 to 17 percent of the weighed salt. That is an estimate from the sequence, not a measurement, and only a stated counterion content or net peptide content figure resolves it for a given lot.

The second is water. Lyophilised peptides are hygroscopic and retain residual moisture, which is what the Karl Fischer titration on a certificate reports. Water in the vial is mass you weighed and paid for, and it is also the main determinant of how long the powder stays intact in storage.

Neither of these is a scandal. They are ordinary properties of synthetic peptide material. They matter to a price article because they mean the honest sentence is not "$3.75 per milligram of MOTS-c" but "$3.75 per milligram of labelled mass", and the difference is a number the seller is in a position to state and usually does not.

There is a second reason to care about the counterion specifically. Residual trifluoroacetate is not analytically inert in cell work: it has been reported to inhibit proliferation of osteoblasts and chondrocytes at concentrations reachable from ordinary peptide preparations, which makes it a variable in an assay rather than a rounding error on an invoice.

Which certificate lines change the effective price

Four measurements are standard on a peptide certificate of analysis. Each one either narrows or leaves open the question of what fraction of your $37.50 bought the molecule you wanted.

Purity at 214 nm is the number that gets quoted and the one most often misread. It is an area percentage from a chromatogram, not a mass fraction of the vial, and it says nothing about water or salt. A batch can be 99 percent pure by area and still be well under 90 percent peptide by weight. Both statements can be true of the same certificate because they measure different things.

A result is also only interpretable against a method. Regulated analytical work has to demonstrate that the procedure is fit for purpose, the principle set out in ICH Q2(R2). Research-supply certificates are voluntary documents under no such obligation, which is why a named laboratory, a report date and a visible chromatogram matter more than a headline percentage.

The vendor on this page publishes certificates from two independent laboratories per lot, Kovera Labs batch 24-05260628 and MZ Biolabs batch 24-01260229. Read the one bearing the lot number on the vial you are sent. Our supplier criteria set out what a batch-specific certificate has to contain.

Comparing the MOTS-c cost and price against other research peptides

On the same supplier, the discounted retatrutide vials work out at $4.95 and $4.17 per labelled milligram, against $3.75 for MOTS-c. That comparison is meaningful because the terms, the code and the testing programme are identical across the two products, so the only variable is the material.

Comparisons across suppliers are much weaker, and the reason is the denominator problem again. Research peptides differ in molecular weight, in typical fill mass, in counterion load and in whether a net peptide content figure is stated at all, so two prices per milligram can be describing different quantities of molecule. Longer or more heavily modified sequences cost more to synthesise and purify, which is why a per-milligram figure only compares like with like when the sequences are similar.

A more useful unit for planning is cost per experiment rather than cost per milligram. A 10 mg vial reconstituted for laboratory use divides into a fixed number of working aliquots, and the arithmetic that governs that split is set out in our reconstitution accuracy guide. Comparable framing for the other cluster is in the retatrutide cost breakdown.

What no price tells you about the evidence

MOTS-c is a peptide encoded within the mitochondrial genome, described by Lee and colleagues in Cell Metabolism in 2015 as a regulator of metabolic homeostasis acting through AMPK. That work, and most of what has followed it, is cell culture and rodent work. On this site it grades as preclinical.

The nearest thing to human data is not MOTS-c. CohBar took an analogue, CB4211, through a Phase 1a/1b safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics study (NCT03998514), which completed in April 2021 with 88 participants; the company subsequently wound down. An analogue is a different molecule, so that record does not transfer to MOTS-c itself. There is no Phase 3 programme and no large human efficacy trial.

Set against that, $37.50 is neither cheap nor expensive in any sense that has been established. It is the cost of acquiring a well-characterised sample of a compound whose effects in humans are unknown. Material sold for laboratory research is not manufactured, tested or released to the standards that apply to an approved medicine, at any price, and nothing on this page describes or implies human use. For the framework behind these gradings, see what research peptides are.