Accepted answer
In practice, the lyophilised solid is far more robust than anything anyone says about it, and the solution is far less robust. Most of the confusion in this area comes from advice about one being applied to the other.
The 28-day figure for a reconstituted preserved vial is microbiological, not chemical. Chemically, a well-behaved peptide at 5 mg/mL at 4 °C will typically lose well under a per cent of content per month. The reason to respect the date is bioburden, and bioburden is a function of how many times you have opened it, not of the calendar.
Aggregation is the failure mode that reverse-phase HPLC is worst at detecting, because a large soluble aggregate may not elute at all and an insoluble one is filtered out during sample preparation. If your purity result comes back normal but the vial looks hazy, believe the vial. Size-exclusion chromatography is the method that sees this.
The licensed semaglutide and tirzepatide presentations carry in-use periods of several weeks at room temperature in their labelling, which is the closest thing to real stability data in this space — and it applies to a buffered, surfactant-containing, preservative-containing formulation, not to a reconstituted research vial.
One qualification: none of this addresses sterility. A vial can be chemically pristine and microbiologically compromised, and a chromatogram will not tell you which.
Minimise transitions rather than minimising temperature. One freeze and one thaw is fine; five is a different question.
7This should probably be in the site help pages rather than buried in an answer. – halvard_ness 9 months ago 6Good answer, but the confidence interval in the cited trial is wider than implied. – felix_araya 7 months ago add a comment