We started as a Google Doc that got out of hand.
Sequence & Signal has been publishing from Madison, Wisconsin since 2021. We cover peptide biochemistry, the trial literature, and the regulatory record — and we do it without selling anything.
How this started
In 2019 and 2020 our founder covered a compounding dispute in front of a state pharmacy board. It was, on paper, a dull story: a licensing question, a set of inspection findings, several hundred pages of exhibits, and a hearing schedule that kept slipping. What made it interesting was the gallery. People kept showing up who had no stake in the licensing outcome and every stake in the substance at issue, and they had clearly tried to read the underlying science themselves. They had printouts. They had highlighter. They had, in a couple of cases, gotten further into a pharmacokinetics paper than the reporter had.
They were also getting it wrong in predictable ways — treating a preprint as though it had cleared review, reading a phase 2 safety signal as a phase 3 result, assuming that a compound named in a regulatory document had thereby been endorsed by the agency that named it. Not one of those errors came from carelessness. They came from the fact that nobody had ever explained how the documents fit together, and the places that were happy to explain it were, without exception, selling something.
So the annotations started. A shared Google Doc, a handful of papers a month, a paragraph at the top of each one saying what the study had actually tested and what it hadn't. It was meant for about six people. By the middle of 2021 it was forty pages, the comment threads had comment threads, and the file had reached the size where Gmail stops letting you send it as an attachment and starts suggesting a link instead. That felt like a signal. We registered a domain in September 2021 and moved the annotations somewhere they could be read in a sensible order.
The publication has grown since — four people now, a weekly newsletter, a slower-moving library of briefs — but the job has not changed. We read the primary documents, we say what they establish, and we are specific about where the record stops. If that sounds modest, it is. The alternative is the internet we already have.
Nobody had explained how the documents fit together. The places that were happy to explain it were, without exception, selling something.
Mission
We publish plain-language explanations of peptide science, clinical trial evidence, and the regulations that govern both, sourced to named journals and agency documents, so that a non-specialist reader can tell the difference between what has been demonstrated, what is being tested, and what is merely being claimed.
We sell nothing. We broker nothing. We take no money from any company that makes, compounds, distributes, or markets any substance we might write about, and we never publish dosing, protocols, or sourcing information. Our commitment is that a reader can finish any piece on this site without having been sold anything or told what to put in their body.
Funding & independence
Sequence & Signal is reader-supported. Our revenue comes from voluntary reader contributions and from a small institutional subscription used by a handful of libraries and pharmacy programs. We carry no advertising, run no sponsored posts, accept no industry funding — including from manufacturers, compounders, distributors, telehealth companies, and trade associations — and hold no affiliate relationships. We have never been paid to publish or withhold a piece, and there is no arrangement under which we could be.
Editorial decisions are made by the editorial staff alone. Contributors disclose relevant financial and professional interests before assignment, and those disclosures appear on the piece. The full policy, including what we do when a conflict surfaces after publication, is on our editorial standards page.
The people
Four full-time staff, one advisory pharmacologist, and a rotating group of outside readers who check our chemistry before it goes anywhere.
Nora Beckstrand
Founder & EditorNora spent eleven years as a general-assignment and science reporter in Wisconsin and Minnesota before starting the annotations that became this publication. She runs assignment, edits the trial-literacy beat, and writes the Thursday newsletter. She is the person who answers when you write to say we got something wrong.
Priya Raghunathan, PhD
Science EditorPriya holds a PhD in medicinal chemistry and spent six years in analytical method development before moving into science writing. She edits everything on this site that touches chemistry, and she is the reason our purity and identity language is as fussy as it is. She writes the analytical chemistry brief.
Dean Kowalczyk
Regulatory CorrespondentDean worked nine years as staff to a state board of pharmacy, where he prepared the case files and read the rulemaking comments nobody else read. He covers approval pathways, compounding law, and enforcement actions. He is unreasonably good at finding the version of a guidance document that was actually in force at the time.
Helen Adeyemi
Copy Chief & Fact-checkerHelen came from academic publishing, where she checked citations for a clinical journal and developed a lasting distrust of the phrase "studies show." Every factual claim on this site is traced back to its named source before it publishes. If a sentence on this page is hedged, she is usually why.
What makes us different
We have nothing to sell you
Most writing about peptides sits somewhere in a sales funnel, even when the writing itself is careful. Ours doesn't, because there is no funnel. That constraint is the whole editorial product: it is what lets us write "the evidence does not support that" without a business consequence.
We classify every compound we mention
Whenever we name a compound class, we say which of three buckets it sits in — approved by the FDA for a stated indication, currently in clinical trials, or neither approved nor supported by completed human trials. The distinction is doing most of the work in these stories, and collapsing it is the single most common failure in coverage of this field.
We cite documents, not vibes
Claims are attributed to a named journal and year or a named agency and document title, listed at the end of each piece. Where we are relying on a preprint, we label it as a preprint in the sentence that uses it. Where the record is thin, we say the record is thin rather than reaching for a confident paraphrase.
One email, Thursday mornings.
A short annotated list of what published this week in peptide science and regulation, with a sentence on why each item is worth your time — or why it isn't.
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