PEPTIDE_LOCAL: proposed OMOP vocabulary for 12 therapeutic peptides without NDC/RxNorm — request for community feedback

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Hi everyone,

I opened a vocabulary proposal on GitHub for a use case I haven’t seen addressed in OMOP: therapeutic peptides used in compounding pharmacies and the gray market.

Compounds like BPC-157, TB-500, ipamorelin, sermorelin, and cerebrolysin have no NDC codes, no RxNorm entries, and no OMOP concept identifiers — making them invisible to any CDM-based pharmacovigilance analysis.

I identified 173 FAERS reports across 6 of these compounds, with seriousness rates up to 100% and cerebrolysin showing 15 deaths in 75 cases. These signals exist but cannot be studied in OMOP today.

The proposal covers 12 compounds with CAS/ChEMBL anchoring and maps_to RxNorm for the two FDA-approved compounds (tesamorelin, bremelanotide).

Timing context: the FDA advisory panel is meeting in July 2026 to review peptide compound safety — vocabulary infrastructure would enable the community to contribute evidence to that process.

GitHub issue with full details: New vocabulary proposal: PEPTIDE_LOCAL — OMOP CDM vocabulary for therapeutic peptides without NDC/RxNorm coverage · Issue #1255 · OHDSI/Vocabulary-v5.0 · GitHub

A few specific questions for the Vocabulary team:

  1. Is “Peptide Ingredient” an acceptable concept_class_id, or should these map to an existing class?
  2. What concept_id namespace is safe for local vocabularies?
  3. Should standard_concept be ‘C’ or NULL for non-approved compounds?

Appreciate any feedback. Happy to present at a future Vocabulary WG call if useful.

Igor Eduardo
Eterna Research, Austin, TX
ORCID: 0009-0005-6288-1135

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Hi @Igor_Eduardo

All of the ingredients (even the deadly cerebrolysin) you have mentioned in your post have OMOP concept_ids. You can find them in RxNorm Extension vocabulary, created inside OMOP world to expand RxNorm for drugs that are not yet there (eg. non-US markets). The mentioned molecules were originally so-called Investigational Drugs and did not get NDC or RxNorm codes, so we created unique identifiers for them in RxNorm Extension.

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Thank you — this is very helpful. I was not aware
these were already covered in RxNorm Extension as
Investigational Drugs.

I appreciate the correction and will review the
existing concept_ids before proceeding further.

Could you point me to the best way to search
RxNorm Extension for these compounds in Athena?
I want to make sure I’m using the correct
concept_ids in my analysis.

Thank you,
Igor Eduardo

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The best way to search for the concept is using browsers like Athena or one in Atlas. You can filter by Standard concept first, this way you will allow standard concepts from all vocabularies. If you can’t find the standard concept, there is still a chance concept is present as a non-standard. So remove all filters.

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