Resources - RESEARCH LITERACY
Why nobody can give you a peptide dose
Search any research peptide and you will find a confident dosage range. For most of them there is no human trial behind that number - and for several, no controlled human trial has published any results at all.
Search any research peptide with the word "dosage" and you will get a confident answer within seconds. A range in micrograms or milligrams, a frequency, often a cycle length. It reads like settled knowledge. For most of these compounds it is not knowledge at all - it is a number that got repeated until it sounded official.
This page explains where those figures actually come from, why this site does not republish them, and what to ask of any dose you encounter.
What a dose has to have behind it to mean anything
A dose is not a property of a compound. It is a finding from a study, and it only carries meaning together with the rest of that study: who was given it, by what route, how often, for how long, and with what monitoring in place. Change the population and the same number can mean something different. Change the route and it can mean nothing at all.
That is why a bare figure is close to useless even when it is real. A quantity on its own is not information. "In a 2017 trial of 62 women at high risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome during IVF, all received a weight-based dose by subcutaneous injection under clinical supervision, and half were then randomly assigned a second dose" is information, because everything needed to judge whether it applies to anyone else is attached to it.
Where the numbers circulating online actually come from
We went looking for the source of the commonly quoted figures for the compounds most often searched in this field, requiring a named published human trial or a regulator's label for each. The pattern was consistent. Trace a widely repeated figure and it rarely ends at a study. It ends at a vendor's product page, a forum thread, or an article citing an article citing an article.
Repetition is what gives these numbers their authority. When ten sites agree, it looks like corroboration. It usually means nine of them copied the tenth, and the tenth was someone's estimate. Nothing was ever verified; the figure simply survived.
The compounds where no human dose exists at all
Some of the most searched compounds in this field have no published controlled human trial at all, so no study has established a human dose for them. On the question of dose, this is not a thin evidence base - it is an empty one.
- BPC-157 - four studies are now registered on ClinicalTrials.gov: a Phase 1 study registered in 2015 whose status has not been updated since and which never reported, a Phase 2 study registered in 2026 that is recruiting, a Phase 1 study not yet recruiting, and a study of an oral product marked completed with no results posted. No controlled human trial has published results. The only published human reports are three small uncontrolled case series from a single clinic, and none of them establishes a dose.
- TB-500 - one placebo-controlled human trial of the compound itself was registered in 2026 and is recruiting; we found no published human trial. The doses quoted for it are usually thymosin beta-4 doses, which is a different, longer molecule.
- Epithalon - the human longevity work most often cited used epithalamin, a bovine pineal peptide extract, in elderly cardiac patients. That is a different substance in a different population, so nothing from it describes the synthetic peptide.
- GHK-Cu - every human study we located used it topically. We could not find any human trial of injected GHK-Cu, published or registered.
- 5-Amino-1MQ - we found no human clinical trial in any indication. Every controlled study we located was in rodents.
For each of those, the honest answer to "what is the dose" is that nobody knows, because the study that would establish it has not been done.
The mix-ups that produce confident wrong numbers
Beyond absent data, a second problem generates figures that look sourced but are not: the number is real, and it belongs to something else.
TB-500 and thymosin beta-4 are the clearest case. AOD-9604 is another - its published human studies used intravenous and oral routes, and we found no published human trial using subcutaneous injection, yet subcutaneous figures for it are everywhere. CJC-1295 is a third: all published human dosing is for the version with DAC, which is a pharmacologically different agent from the modified GRF(1-29) usually sold under the same name.
In each case a genuine number exists somewhere in the literature. It has simply been attached to the wrong molecule, the wrong route, or the wrong species, and then repeated by people with no reason to check.
Why an animal dose cannot be converted in your head
The most common defence of an unsourced figure is that it comes from animal research. Scaling between species is not arithmetic on body weight. Metabolic rate, clearance, receptor distribution, protein binding and lifespan all differ, and they do not differ by the same factor.
Formal conversion methods exist and are used to choose a starting dose for a first-in-human trial. Even then, they produce a hypothesis to be tested cautiously under medical supervision, with escalation only if tolerated. They are the beginning of a process designed to find out whether the estimate was right - which it frequently is not. Treating the output of that calculation as an answer inverts its entire purpose.
What "we could not verify a dose" actually tells you
On several compounds the finding was not that no research exists, but that the research exists and never published a dose anyone can check. Selank is the clearest example: three PubMed-indexed Russian trials with real populations and comparators, and not one of their English abstracts states a dose, a route or a duration. Every specific figure we found circulating for it traced to vendor and nootropic pages instead.
That is a more useful thing to know than a number would be. It tells you the evidence base is not what the marketing implies, and that anyone quoting a precise figure with confidence is not working from the studies.
The question that settles it
You do not need pharmacology to assess a dosage claim. One question does most of the work: where is this from? Which study, in whom, by what route, for how long, published where.
A figure with a real answer will survive it. Most will not - the chain will end at a shop, a forum, or an article with no citation. That is not a reason to look harder for a better number. For most of these compounds the number does not exist yet, and the confident ones are the least trustworthy, because certainty is the part that was invented.
Educational content only, and not medical advice. This page explains why dosing figures circulating for research compounds are usually unsourced; it is not a guide to using anything, and nothing here should be read as suggesting any compound is safe or appropriate to use. The compounds named here are not licensed as medicines in the UK, which means no regulator has assessed them for safety, quality or efficacy in humans.
Frequently asked
- Why does this site not publish peptide dosages?
- Because for most research peptides there is no dose to publish. A dose is only meaningful if it comes from a study that says who was given it, how, for how long and under what supervision. For the majority of compounds discussed online, no such study has been completed and published, so any figure quoted is practice rather than evidence.
- Where do the dosage figures online actually come from?
- Overwhelmingly from other websites. Trace a typical figure and it leads to a vendor page, a forum post or an article citing another article, rather than to a trial. Numbers repeated widely acquire an authority they never earned, because repetition looks like corroboration when every source is copying the same original guess.
- Has BPC-157 been dosed in human trials?
- No controlled human trial of BPC-157 has published results. Four studies are now registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, including a Phase 1 study from 2015 whose status has not been updated since and a Phase 2 study registered in 2026 that is recruiting, but none has posted results. The only published human reports are three small uncontrolled case series from a single clinic, and none of them establishes a dose. The figures in circulation do not come from any controlled human study, and most of the animal work they are loosely derived from used a different route entirely.
- Is TB-500 the same as thymosin beta-4?
- No, and this is one of the most consequential mix-ups in the field. Thymosin beta-4 is the full 43-amino-acid peptide and has been studied in humans for unrelated indications by unrelated routes. TB-500 is a short synthetic fragment. Figures quoted for TB-500 are frequently borrowed from thymosin beta-4 studies that did not use TB-500 at all, so they describe nothing about it.
- Does an animal study dose tell you a human dose?
- No. Converting between species is not a matter of scaling by body weight; metabolism, clearance, receptor distribution and lifespan all differ. Formal conversion methods exist for designing a first human trial and are treated as a starting hypothesis to be tested under supervision, not as an answer. A figure derived this way outside a trial is a guess wearing a decimal point.
- What should you do with a dosage figure you find online?
- Treat it as a claim and ask for its source. Which study, in whom, by what route, for how long, published where. If the answer is another website, a forum, or a seller, you have found the origin of the number and it is not evidence. That question alone eliminates most of what circulates.
The studies and sources behind this page
- Vasireddi N, Hahamyan H, Salata MJ, et al. Emerging Use of BPC-157 in Orthopaedic Sports Medicine: A Systematic Review. HSS J 2025;21(4):485-495.
- ClinicalTrials.gov. NCT02637284: PCO-02 - Safety and Pharmacokinetics Trial (BPC-157, Phase 1, first submitted 15 Dec 2015, status unknown, no results posted).
- Esposito S, Deventer K, Goeman J, Van der Eycken J, Van Eenoo P. Synthesis and characterization of the N-terminal acetylated 17-23 fragment of thymosin beta 4 identified in TB-500, a product suspected to possess doping potential. Drug Test Anal 2012;4(9):733-8.
- Ruff D, Crockford D, Girardi G, Zhang Y. A randomized, placebo-controlled, single and multiple dose study of intravenous thymosin beta4 in healthy volunteers. Ann N Y Acad Sci 2010;1194:223-9.
- Korkushko OV, Khavinson VKh, Shatilo VB, Antonyuk-Shcheglova IA. Geroprotective effect of epithalamine (pineal gland peptide preparation) in elderly subjects with accelerated aging. Bull Exp Biol Med 2006;142(3):356-9.
- Dominikowski A, Rękoś Z, Olejarz M, et al. The emerging landscape of performance-enhancing peptides modulating GH-IGF1 axis: bridging the gap between clinical evidence and patient self-administration. Front Endocrinol 2026;17:1822475.
- US Food and Drug Administration. Guidance for Industry: Estimating the Maximum Safe Starting Dose in Initial Clinical Trials for Therapeutics in Adult Healthy Volunteers. July 2005.
- Abbara A, Clarke S, Islam R, et al. A second dose of kisspeptin-54 improves oocyte maturation in women at high risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome: a Phase 2 randomized controlled trial. Hum Reprod 2017;32(9):1915-1924.
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Educational content only. Not medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before changing your health regimen.