Peptide gelling and poor customer service
I ordered ARA-290 and the vials gel up, creating peptide aggregates upon reconstitution with either BAC water or BAC saline (all at room temperature). They suggested I leave the vials at room temperature and shake them as a solution and went on to tell me that the hospira brand was too acidic and that they do not supply BAC water that is alkaline enough to dissolve ARA. I’ve used 3 other vendors to purchase ARA and all dissolved completely fine and were very effective for my research. There was no solution offered and I’ve just wasted a bunch of money trying Kimera Chems when I should have just stuck to my other vendors. I’m disappointed as I was hoping to use other products in my research, but unfortunately I no longer trust this company to deliver quality research supplies.
Svar från Kimerachems
Thank you for your feedback — we take every review seriously.
We want to address this transparently. ARA-290 is well documented across the research community for gelling when reconstituted with standard bacteriostatic water, which typically sits around pH 5.5. This isn't unique to our product — it's a known characteristic of this peptide. It requires a reconstitution vehicle at or above physiological pH (7.4) to remain in solution. A sterile sodium bicarbonate buffer or pH-adjusted vehicle resolves this.
If other vendors' ARA-290 dissolves without issue in the same acidic BAC water, that likely means they've incorporated buffering excipients into their lyophilized formulation — which is a valid approach, but it doesn't mean an unbuffered product is defective. It means the reconstitution protocol differs.
That said, we should have had this guidance clearly stated on our product page and communicated it better when you reached out. That's a miss on our end and we're correcting it.
We'd genuinely like to make this right. Please contact our support team directly and we'll work out a resolution. We appreciate you giving us the opportunity to address this.
— Kimera Chems