How we verify research buyers

• Universities and colleges, through a department or research group.
• Research institutes and other research organisations.
• Companies with research and development work, such as biotech, pharmaceutical, chemical and analytical companies, where we can see the research and where it takes place.

Orders come from the institution, not from an individual working there. A student's order comes through the supervisor or the lab manager.

When you open a research account, we confirm four things:

1. The institution is real. We check it against a public source: Companies House for UK companies, the official list of recognised universities and colleges on GOV.UK, or the equivalent register in your country.
2. A named researcher is responsible. We need the name, role and institutional email of the person responsible for the work, usually a principal investigator or lab manager, and we confirm them through the institution's own website or directory.
3. The research purpose makes sense. A sentence or two on the research the products are for. We don't need details of your experiments, only enough to see that the request is for laboratory research.
4. The delivery address belongs to the institution. We deliver to laboratories, departments, goods-in desks and company premises, not to home addresses.

A signed end-use declaration: laboratory research by qualified staff only, no use in people or animals, and no resale for those uses. It's short, and it travels with the order documents. Read the declaration

We decline a request, or close an account, if:

• we can't confirm the institution, the responsible researcher or the delivery address;
• the request asks for dosing, reconstitution for use, or any advice about use in people or animals;
• anything in the request suggests use in people or animals, or resale for those uses;
• the details given turn out to be false.

We'll tell you if we decline. We don't supply part of an order while a check is unresolved.

Peptides sold for research are, in practice, often bought for use in people, and a "research use only" label on its own changes nothing in UK law: what counts is how a product is presented and what it's really for. Checking the buyer is the part of research supply that a label can't do. Research use only, explained

It also protects the researchers we supply: a supplier that sells to anyone is a supplier whose batches, documents and reputation you can't rely on.

Tell us when the responsible researcher changes or the delivery address moves. We may re-check an account when its details change or when we haven't supplied it for a while.

We use the details you give us to verify the account, keep records of who we supplied, and meet our legal obligations. Privacy notice