When injecting peptides, do I need to inject air into the peptide vial before extraction?

When injecting weight loss peptides, such as Semaglutide, tirzepatide, retatrutide, whether it is necessary to inject air into the peptide vial before extracting the solution? Members have different views on whether air injection is necessary.

In the discussion, most people are on the side of we need to inject the air into the peptide vials before extraction. I will briefly summarize some of the reasons given below.

Necessary

1. A nurse said that he had been absorbing the air into the syringe and injecting the peptide vial, without any adverse reactions, and the drug had been working as expected. In nursing schools, medical schools, and pharmacy schools, they are told all the time to fill the vial with the same amount of air as the liquid you plan to draw.
2. Almost all suppliers/pharmacies recommend pushing in air to create negative pressure in order to extract the medicine in the vacuum of the bottle. Only a handful of pharmacies have explicitly said not to do so.
3. It has been suggested that people do not want to inject air for fear that the injected air will contaminate the unused peptides in the bottle. However, there is no evidence that injecting air into the vial introduces any pathogens into the vial.
4. Some people insist that we have to inject air because if you only draw from the vial, you will create a vacuum inside, which will make it more difficult to draw the correct volume (and also more likely to make the vial slowly absorb the air in the refrigerator, which almost certainly has more fungus and bacteria in the air than any room you use for injections in your home). And because BAC water contains benzyl alcohol, which kills any bacteria or viruses in the injected air, the injected air may contain peptides that bacteria won’t affect in the vial.

Somes thought that if we need to inject air needs to consider the size of the peptide bottle, small bottles do not need to inject air, large peptide bottles need to inject air.

Unnecessary

The other side, in turn, argues that it is not necessary to inject air into the peptide bottle. Their reasons convinced me.

In fact, whether or not you need to inject air into the peptide bottle depends on the quality of your peptide supplier. Those who are concerned about the absorption of outside air into the peptide bottle due to negative pressure may be due to the substandard packaging of your peptide bottle. Today’s weight loss peptides come in vacuum-sealed vials that are sterile and maintain negative pressure inside to ensure that we can draw out the drug solution smoothly out of the vials. Therefore, there is no situation of unable to draw the solution, and it is not easy to have outside air enter the vial while the drug. So, we don’t need to inject these peptide vials with air.

Peptide drugs are often sensitive to outside air, especially oxygen and moisture in the air, which can cause peptide degradation. For such vacuum-closed peptide vials, if inject air into the vial, it may break the negative pressure environment of the vial, affecting the stability and sterility of the peptide.

If it is indeed difficult to extract in the final extraction solution, we can gently inject a very small amount of air to balance the pressure in the bottle, and it is not necessary to inject the same amount of air into the peptide bottle each time.