Inside Tech’s Feverish Demand for Retatrutide, a Supposed Super Peptide

For more than a decade, Dr. Molly Maloof has had a front-row seat to Silicon Valley’s ever-evolving health obsessions as a physician and founder of M3 Healthspan, a San Francisco–based concierge medical practice serving the tech elite. Lately, those conversations have focused on one substance perceived as a wonder drug among wonder drugs: retatrutide—or reta for short.

Like GLP-1s such as Wegovy and Ozempic, reta is a peptide-based drug, but it purportedly offers the potential for far greater weight loss, without the depletion of muscle people experience from those other treatments, which have already become ultrapopular. “Pretty much all my clients want to talk about peptides,” Maloof said. “And reta is the one people want to talk most about.”

Around a quarter of Maloof’s 20 patients currently take reta, up from just one or two of them a year ago. The FDA hasn’t approved it, and it cannot be purchased through an ordinary pharmacy. Maloof buys reta from Soma Peptides, a California company that claims to handle much of its peptide sourcing and manufacturing domestically. (Most vendors selling reta import the drug’s key ingredients from China or India.) While federal law prohibits the sale of reta for human use, businesses like Soma are attempting to dodge regulations by selling the drug for “research” purposes. Maloof acknowledges that she is putting her medical license “on the line” by providing it to her patients. (Soma did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

“Technically, nobody should really be prescribing retatrutide right now,” Maloof said. Yet she’s undeterred, saying she has personally seen how reta has helped her patients with their weight and metabolic health. In her practice, Maloof holds herself to a modern addendum to the hippocratic oath. “If somebody needs something, I’m going to get it for them.”