CJC-1295: There Are Two Versions, and All the Research Is for One of Them

Most entries here are about a compound with thin evidence. This one is about a compound with reasonable evidence attached to the wrong molecule.

CJC-1295 has three published human papers, a real pharmaceutical sponsor, and a measured half life. All of it describes a version that many vendors do not sell.

What the DAC actually is

CJC-1295, as its developer defined it, is a modified fragment of growth hormone releasing hormone carrying an extra piece on the end: a maleimidopropionamide group that chemically bonds to a specific site on albumin, the most abundant protein in blood. (PMID 15817669)

DAC stands for Drug Affinity Complex. It is not an optional upgrade to a peptide that exists without it. It is the defining feature of the molecule that carries the name.

Albumin is the body's long haul carrier. It circulates for weeks. The DAC is a chemical clip that fastens the peptide to it, so the peptide travels wherever albumin travels and persists about as long. Remove the clip and you have not made a gentler version of the same drug. You have made a passenger with no ride.

In the original rat work, the conjugated peptide was still detectable in plasma beyond 72 hours, and Western blot confirmed it was still bound to albumin from 15 minutes out past 24 hours. (PMID 15817669)

What is sold as "CJC-1295 without DAC" is a vendor naming convention. I could not find a primary source in which the developer, or anyone else in the peer reviewed literature, applied the name CJC-1295 to the peptide with the clip removed. It also is not sermorelin, which is the unmodified fragment with no substitutions at all. Three different molecules, two of which share a product name.

What the human trials found

Three papers, all DAC.

Teichman 2006 is the pivotal one. Two randomised, placebo controlled, double blind ascending dose trials, 28 and 49 days, in healthy adults aged 21 to 61, injected under the skin. A single injection produced dose dependent increases in mean plasma growth hormone of 2 to 10 fold lasting six days or more, and IGF-1 of 1.5 to 3 fold lasting 9 to 11 days. Estimated half life 5.8 to 8.1 days. Best tolerated doses were 30 or 60 mcg/kg. (PMID 16352683)

Those are real numbers from a real trial, and they are the numbers every vendor page quotes.

Ionescu and Frohman 2006 gave healthy men 60 or 90 mcg/kg and then sampled blood every 20 minutes across 12 overnight hours a week later. Basal growth hormone rose 7.5 fold, mean growth hormone 46 percent, IGF-1 45 percent. Pulse frequency and pulse size were unchanged. (PMID 17018654)

One detail in that paper deserves more attention than it gets: there was no significant difference between the two dose groups. Going from 60 to 90 mcg/kg bought nothing.

Sackmann-Sala 2009 is a proteomics substudy in 11 men, looking at which blood proteins shifted a week after an injection. It is biomarker discovery, not an efficacy trial, and its abstract does not state the dose or route. (PMID 19386527)

That is the complete published human record.

And there was a fourth study that never spoke. NCT00267527, sponsored by ConjuChem, was a multicentre randomised placebo controlled trial of CJC-1295 in HIV patients with visceral obesity. 120 participants, 12 weeks of treatment, started December 2005. Status: terminated. No results posted, and no publication I could find. I pulled the raw registry record to confirm it is genuine rather than one of the fabricated entries now sitting on that site, and it is.

So the only trial that set out to measure whether this compound changes anything about a person's body was stopped, and nobody has said what it saw.

The version people actually inject

Here is the gap the whole entry turns on.

A 2026 review in Frontiers in Endocrinology graded these compounds by evidence quality. CJC-1295 with DAC came out Tier B: Phase I pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies in healthy adults, no controlled efficacy data. CJC-1295 without DAC came out Tier D, defined as "No peer-reviewed human studies." (PMID 42395176)

I checked that independently rather than take it. A PubMed search for CJC-1295 returns 32 records. Reading every title: the rat bioconjugate paper, a growth hormone knockout mouse paper, the three human DAC papers above, roughly twenty doping control chemistry papers, one study of online forums, and eight 2026 narrative reviews. There is no human study of the no-DAC peptide in there.

There is also no published human safety data for it, of any kind. Not a smaller amount than the DAC version. None.

Marketing that quotes Teichman's 2 to 10 fold growth hormone rise to sell a daily no-DAC product is moving a result across the exact bond that produced it.

Where the dose comes from

The conventions, as documented in the peer reviewed literature rather than invented here, are 1 to 2 mg per week for the DAC version in one or two injections, and 100 to 200 mcg per injection once or twice daily for the no-DAC version. (PMID 42395176)

Put the DAC number against the trial. Teichman's best tolerated doses were 30 to 60 mcg/kg, which for a 75 kg adult is about 2.25 to 4.5 mg per injection. The community convention of 1 to 2 mg per week is roughly a quarter to a half of a single studied dose.

That is the opposite of BPC-157, where the circulating number sits above everything the research supports. It is the same direction as ipamorelin. But being lower is not the same as being conservative in a way that means anything, because a dose below the studied range is still a dose no trial administered. Nobody has measured what 1 mg a week does.

For the no-DAC version there is nothing to compare against at all, because the studied range does not exist.

There is one peer reviewed study of how these numbers propagate in the first place. It is a netnographic analysis of 23 discussion threads across nine bodybuilding websites, examining how women using CJC-1295 arrive at doses. The mechanism it describes is communal online folk pharmacology, and it records the users' own uncertainty about how they are estimating. (PMID 26771670)

Nobody has studied the stack

CJC-1295 is almost always sold with ipamorelin, on the reasoning that one acts on the growth hormone releasing hormone receptor and the other on the ghrelin receptor, so the two should combine. They are genuinely different receptors, and ipamorelin has its own entry here.

A PubMed search for both names together returns nine records. Eight are narrative reviews published in 2026. The ninth is a 2013 equine doping control method paper. I could not find any original study, in humans or animals, that administered both and measured an outcome. ClinicalTrials.gov has no registered trial of the combination either.

The same 2026 review that grades the evidence acknowledges this directly. It describes the no-DAC peptide as "often used in combination with Ipamorelin to increase pulsatile GH release" while noting that controlled evidence for synergy or for meaningful body composition outcomes remains limited. (PMID 42395176)

What nobody knows

Whether it changes anything you can see. No published human study of either compound measured body composition, lean mass, fat mass, strength, sleep architecture, injury or tendon healing, or skin. The human endpoints on record are hormone concentrations, pharmacokinetics, blood proteins, and for ipamorelin, time to tolerating solid food after bowel surgery. Every body composition claim made for this stack rests on an endpoint no trial recorded.

Whether it is safe for as long as people use it. Teichman reported no serious adverse reactions, and that reassurance has a ceiling: the trials ran 28 and 49 days. The community convention is 8 to 16 week cycles. There is no published human safety data for the DAC version past 49 days, and none at all for the version without it.

Whether a higher dose does more. The one paper that tested two doses head to head found no difference between them.

Regulatory status

WADA. Both are prohibited at all times, in and out of competition, under section S2. CJC-1295 is named explicitly among the growth hormone releasing hormone analogues, alongside sermorelin and tesamorelin; ipamorelin is named among the secretagogues alongside ibutamoren and anamorelin. I was not able to pull WADA's own PDF directly for this entry, so treat the exact clause as reported by national anti-doping mirrors rather than quoted from source.

Worth knowing that this class is not merely banned on paper. Roughly twenty of the 32 published papers on CJC-1295 are doping control chemistry, developing assays to detect it in urine, plasma and blood at picogram concentrations. People have spent two decades building tests for this.

FDA. Neither compound is approved for anything, in any form, and neither is on the 503A Bulks List.

Both were placed in Category 2 of the interim compounding list in September 2023, the tier for substances that may present significant safety risks, and removed from it effective 27 September 2024. The reason matters and gets misreported constantly: the nominators withdrew their nominations. That is a procedural withdrawal, not a safety clearance.

The advisory committee then voted against adding CJC-1295 to the Bulks List in December 2024, in a vote covering the free base, the acetate and the DAC forms together. I could not retrieve FDA's own meeting materials for that December vote, so it is reported here from concordant legal and industry summaries rather than from the primary record. The parallel October 2024 vote on ipamorelin, which I did verify at source, was 0 in favour and 12 against with 1 abstaining.

One point that clears up most of the confusion in this area: neither compound was ever in Category 1. Nothing about the Category 2 change made either of them permissible to compound.

My take

The interesting thing here is not that the evidence is weak. It is that the evidence is real, and attached to a molecule that is a different product from the one in most carts.

Somebody did the work. ConjuChem built a genuinely clever thing, a peptide that clips onto albumin so it lasts a week instead of minutes, and then measured what it did in real people under placebo control. Those results exist and they are legitimate.

What happened next is that the name travelled and the chemistry did not. The clip came off, the price came down, the daily injection schedule appeared, and Teichman's numbers came along for the ride.

If you are running this, the question worth asking your vendor is not about purity. It is which molecule is in the vial, and whether their certificate names the DAC form or the one with nothing published behind it. Those are different compounds with different masses, and the report will say which one you have.

I would genuinely like to know how many people reading this were told there were two versions at all.

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This content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Peptides discussed are research compounds and may not be approved for human use. Nothing here should be used to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before starting any peptide, supplement, or protocol. Individual responses vary. Do not self-administer compounds without proper medical supervision.