Ipamorelin vs MK-677

There is no winner on this page. What is set side by side is the published record behind each one, which is the part the two are rarely compared on.

Both in Growth hormone

One is injected and one is swallowed, and only one lands on a studied figure. MK-677's convention matches a dose chosen for being the largest tried in 32 elderly people, and nobody re-derived it for adults; the children in its active Phase 3 are dosed per kilogram. Ipamorelin's sits five to twenty one times under what was studied, by a route no human study was found using. Neither position is a safety statement, and MK-677 is the clearer case: in 24 obese men the fasting panel looked unchanged at eight weeks while a test that challenges the body with a measured sugar drink showed impaired handling at two weeks and at eight.

This is not a protocol and neither column is a recommendation. The studied row is what a trial administered to people under supervision. The circulating row is what gets reported in practice, recorded because it is what happens. Where a row is empty it is because nothing has been published, which is a fact about the literature rather than about the compound.
Field	Ipamorelin	MK-677
What a trial gave	About 4.2 mg per day, into a veinThe published Helsinn trial, which missed its endpoint	25 mg, the top of three armsA 1996 dose ranging study in 32 people aged 64 to 81
What circulates	200 to 900 mcg per day, under the skin	10 to 25 mg once daily
The gap	Below the studied dose	Lands on a studied dose
How long it lasts	About two hours. That figure comes from a single study in healthy men where it went into a vein. I could not find a measurement of how long it lasts in a person injecting it under the skin.	I could not find a measurement of this in a person. The roughly 24 hours quoted on vendor pages has no primary human source, and the pages contradict each other.
Route studied	Into a vein, in hospital	By mouth, as a daily pill
Route used	Under the skin, at home	By mouth, usually one capsule at night
Vial sizes	5, 10 mg	No vial size named in the entry

The distance, stated

Below the studied dose

Ipamorelin

Five to twenty one times smaller, and by a route I found no human study of. The smaller number is smaller in a unit no one has converted.

Lands on a studied dose

MK-677

The convention matches a studied dose, but one chosen for being the largest tried in 32 elderly people. Children in the active Phase 3 are dosed per kilogram. Nobody re-derived it for adults.

What people get wrong

Ipamorelin

People believe the headline selling point, that it raises growth hormone without raising stress hormones, is a human finding. It was measured in pigs, once, by the company that owned the molecule, and that same test also failed to detect a rise for an older compound that is known to raise those hormones in people, so the test itself proved nothing. In humans the number of measurements is zero.

MK-677

The mistake that costs people is trusting a normal fasting blood test. In the trial of 24 obese men, fasting sugar and insulin looked unchanged after eight weeks, while a test that challenges the body with a measured sugar drink showed impaired handling at both two weeks and eight weeks. A clean fasting panel here is reassurance from the one test already shown to under report the effect.

Every figure above is carried across from each compound’s entry, which is where the citations live.

All 65 compounds on one page at what circulates vs what was studied, or pick another two to compare.