Editorial standards

melanocortin.com is an open, educational reference on the melanocortin system — the POMC-derived peptides, the MC1R–MC5R receptors, and the therapeutics that target them. It is written to serve three audiences on the same pages: students and researchers who need mechanism and citations; clinicians and curious readers who want an accurate plain-language picture; and anyone arriving from a search engine who deserves a credible answer rather than a content farm.

Because much of this material is health-related, the standard we hold ourselves to is higher than "sounds right." Every substantive claim should be traceable to a primary source, uncertainty should be stated rather than hidden, and the writing should never sell you anything. This page explains how we try to live up to that — and where we have not yet got there.

Why this site exists

The melanocortin system is one of the best-understood signalling families in human biology and one of the worst-served on the open web. The science lives in dense journals on one side; on the other, a grey market in injectable peptides has produced a large volume of hype, half-truths and forum lore, much of it written to sell. Between the two there is very little: a reader who wants to know what MC4R actually does, why a tanning peptide causes nausea, or what a Phase 3 result did and did not show has nowhere credible to go that is also readable. The GLP-1 era has pulled a large audience into caring about the biology of appetite as participants rather than spectators, and for that audience the melanocortin receptors are the next node worth understanding. This site is the in-between: rigorous enough to cite, plain enough to read.

What the site covers, and what it does not

The scope is the system and the medicines built on it. That means the POMC peptides and how they are cut; the five receptors, each on its own page; the endogenous brakes ASIP and AgRP; the receptors' structural biology and pharmacology; the physiology they run — pigment, appetite, the adrenal axis, inflammation, sodium balance; the genetics of what happens when they vary; every approved drug in therapeutics and every investigational one in the pipeline; and the grey-market compounds, melanotan II and PT-141, treated as pharmacology to be understood rather than products to be sourced.

What it does not cover is deliberate. There are no dosing charts, no cycle guides, no vendor comparisons, no reconstitution instructions and no "protocols," for approved drugs or unapproved ones. Those pages exist elsewhere and are precisely the content this site was built as an alternative to. Where a page discusses a grey-market compound, it explains what the molecule does and why its effects are inseparable from its mechanism, and it stops there.

Who writes and edits this

Pages are researched, written, and maintained by the melanocortin.com editorial team. We write from the primary literature and regulatory documents — not by paraphrasing other secondary sites — and we do not use invented credentials or fictional "medical reviewers" to borrow authority we haven't earned.

We are formalising named authorship and independent expert review. Until a qualified reviewer has actually signed off on a page, that page is dated"Last updated," not "Last reviewed" — the two are different claims, and we will not blur them. When named, credentialed review is in place, it will appear on the page and be described here.

Drafting is assisted by AI writing tools, and the repository's commit history records that openly. What the tools do not do is decide what is true. Every reference is resolved against PubMed by its identifier and checked against the title, journal and year it is cited as; every claim about a trial is checked against the trial's own publication or disclosure; and a human editor reviews and merges every change before it is published. A citation that does not support its sentence is a defect we want to hear about, whatever produced it.

What a page must have before it ships

Each content page is built to the same shape, so that a reader who has learned to use one can use any of them.

• A byline and a dated last-update, shown at the top. The date is the year the page was last checked against current sources.
• Key takeaways — the four to six sentences a reader in a hurry needs, written to be correct on their own.
• Numbered citations in the text, each resolving to a reference at the foot of the page with a link to the original.
• Plain statements of uncertainty. Where the science is early, contested or extrapolated from animals, the page says so in the sentence, not in a footnote.
• A "what this is not" note on every drug and peptide page, restating that the page is education, not a protocol.
• Common questions, answered in a paragraph each, for the reader who arrived with one specific question.

How we source claims

Claims of fact link to a citeable source so you can check the original rather than take our word for it. In rough order of preference, we rely on:

• Peer-reviewed primary literature and authoritative reviews— accessed through PubMed / PMC, and cited with PMIDs or DOIs. Primary papers are preferred to reviews, and the original discovery is cited alongside the modern synthesis where both matter.
• Regulatory documents — FDA approvals and prescribing information, and equivalent agency records, for anything about what a drug is approved to do.
• Primary company disclosures — trial results, press releases and filings, used for pipeline status when nothing peer-reviewed yet exists, and always labelled as the interested-party sources they are.
• Reputable trade and medical press — for regulatory events such as an application being accepted, where the news report is the most accessible dated record.

We prefer the strongest available evidence, name the source in the text where it matters, and treat press releases and marketing as claims to verify, not facts to repeat. Two kinds of source are not used: aggregated topic pages that summarise other summaries, and anything that is itself trying to sell the compound it describes.

How figures are made

Every diagram on the site is original: drawn as code, in the open, for the page it sits on. None are stock images or redrawn from a paper's figure. Each is a schematic of a mechanism — how MRAP escorts MC2R to the surface, why the mouse cannot make β-MSH, where the γ-MSH salt loop breaks — with a caption that states what it shows and a source line naming the papers the schematic is drawn after. Figures are checked in both light and dark mode so that no label is lost in either, and they carry text descriptions for readers using screen readers. Where a figure simplifies, the caption says so; "schematic, not to scale" means exactly that.

How pages are reviewed and kept current

• Every page carries a visible byline and a dated last-update.
• Therapeutic and clinical-pipeline information dates quickly, so it is verified against current primary sources before publication and revisited as the field moves. The pipeline page is a dated snapshot and says so; it lists discontinued programmes as well as live ones, because in this field the failures explain the successes.
• Dates are shown to the year. We would rather commit to an honest "updated this year" than imply a false-precision timestamp we can't stand behind.
• Where the science is uncertain, contested, or genuinely unknown, the page says so — plainly — rather than papering over it. Animal findings are labelled as animal findings; a single small trial is called a signal, not a result.
• The full history of every page is public in the repository's commit log, so a reader can see what changed, when, and on what evidence.

Independence and funding

melanocortin.com is editorially independent. It is not sponsored by, and does not take payment from, any pharmaceutical company, compounder, or vendor to cover, favour, downplay, or omit a drug or product. What appears here is driven by what is scientifically and practically true, not by who might pay for coverage.

If the site ever introduces affiliate links or other commercial relationships, they will be clearly disclosed on the pages where they appear, they will not influence what we say about a product, and they will never turn an educational page into a sales pitch. Our bias is stated up front and it is a simple one: toward the reader.

Not medical advice

Content is for education and general information only. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and it is no substitute for a qualified clinician. We do not provide dosing, sourcing, or usage instructions for any drug, approved or otherwise. Never disregard professional medical advice, or delay seeking it, because of something you read here. If you are considering any of the compounds discussed here, including the unapproved ones, the right next step is a conversation with a clinician who knows your history, not a forum.

Corrections

Found an error or an out-of-date claim? Corrections are welcome and credited. The fastest way to reach us is to open an issue on GitHub, where changes are tracked in the open. The most useful report names the page, quotes the sentence, and points to the source that contradicts it. We treat a well-sourced correction as a gift, not a nuisance — flagging a mistake makes the reference better for everyone who reads it next.

Licensing and how to cite

Site content — text and diagrams — is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). The source code is released under the MIT license. Reuse it; just credit the source. A sufficient citation names the page, the site and the year shown on the page — for example, "MC2R — the ACTH receptor. melanocortin.com, 2026." — with a link. The figures' SVG source is in the public repository and may be adapted under the same licence.