The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has raided two premises in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire as part of an “ongoing investigation into an organised criminal network involved in the manufacture and sale of unlicensed weight loss medicines”.
MHRA officers and local police searched a farm and residential property that were “believed to have been used for the manufacture and distribution of unlicensed weight loss medicines” including retatrutide, tirzepatide and “peptide products”, it said.
Read more: Fake Mounjaro pens supplied through UK online pharmacy
The medicines regulator announced today that “almost 2,000 doses of unauthorised weight loss medicines awaiting dispatch to customers” were seized during the raid.
And “manufacturing equipment, suspected pharmaceutical ingredients, packaging and commercial vehicles” were also discovered, it added.
It comes after the MHRA dismantled the “first illicit production facility for weight loss medicine discovered in the UK” in October – a raid that was believed to be the “largest single seizure of trafficked weight loss medicines ever recorded by a law enforcement agency worldwide”.
“We are coming for you”
Health innovation and patient safety minister Dr Zubir Ahmed said that this week’s raid has “taken dangerous, unregulated products off [the] streets”, stressing that these illegal medicines are made “with no regard for safety”.
“We will not allow criminals to profit by exploiting people looking for help with their weight,” he said, reiterating that people should “not buy weight-loss medicines from unregulated sources”.
“Safe, effective, licensed treatments can make a real difference for those who need them - but they must come from a registered pharmacy, with a valid prescription,” Dr Ahmed urged.
Read more: Do not ‘risk health’ by buying illegal meds online, urges MHRA
And head of the MHRA’s criminal enforcement unit Andy Morling said that “the message from today to those illegally trading in medicines could not be clearer: we are coming for you”.
“Our raid in October was just the start,” he said, explaining that “every illegal product and every piece of manufacturing equipment we seize disrupts these criminal networks and brings us closer to dismantling them entirely”.
Morling stressed that the MHRA “will stop at nothing to protect the public and hold criminals to account for the harm they are knowingly doing”.
Read more: MHRA busts ‘first’ UK illicit weight loss jab factory in record raid
The MHRA raid in October lasted for two days and saw “more than 2,000 unlicensed retatrutide and tirzepatide pens” seized along with “tens of thousands of empty weight loss pens ready to be filled” and “raw chemical ingredients.
It comes after C+D exclusively revealed in September that number of weight loss injection pens seized by the MHRA rose by a staggering 163% in the space of just three months between June and August.
