An experimental drug called retatrutide is set to become the most effective weight loss medication seen yet. Unfortunately, some people seem to be suffering severe, even fatal, complications from taking copycat versions of the still unapproved drug.

The Food and Drug Administration has received at least two reports of deaths linked to illicit retatrutide this year, according to documents first revealed by CBS News this week. Though it’s not certain whether counterfeit retatrutide is responsible for these deaths, these are only the latest reports suggesting that such products can be dangerous.

“It is concerning because of the breakdown of our drug-approval process in the United States of America,” Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told CBS News Monday.

Retatrutide is being developed by the company Eli Lilly. It’s the latest iteration of obesity and diabetes medications that leverage certain kinds of hunger-related hormones like GLP-1. Retatrutide in particular mimics GLP-1, GIP, and the hormone glucagon.

Large-scale clinical trials so far have demonstrated that retatrutide may have the greatest potency of any obesity drug developed yet, with weight loss rates reaching as high as 30%—a level on par with gold standard bariatric surgeries. Given these results, the FDA and other regulatory agencies are almost certain to grant Eli Lilly an approval for retatrutide as early as this year.

The approval of earlier GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide (Ozempic and Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro and Zepbound) was quickly followed by the emergence of a gray and black market for these drugs.

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