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Ipamorelin 10 mg
Peptide Library · Profile
Ipamorelin 10 mg
Ipamorelin has been given to human beings in controlled trials, which puts it ahead of most of this catalogue. What those trials measured, and what they found, is almost entirely different from what the compound is sold for — and that gap is the most useful thing on this page.
Molecular weight711.9Da free base · 771.9 as the acetate
Amino acids5three of them non-proteinogenic
Terminal half-life2 hintravenous; never measured subcutaneously
Approved human labelNonedevelopment stopped at phase 2b
The short version
Plain English first. Everything below this section is the same material with the sources, the numbers and the caveats attached.
What it is
A five-amino-acid growth hormone secretagogue. Development stopped at phase 2b, and there is no approved label for it anywhere.
What has actually been measured
It has been given to people in controlled trials, which already puts it ahead of most of this catalogue.
What has not been measured
What it is actually sold for. Those trials measured something almost entirely different from body composition — and the subcutaneous half-life has never been measured at all.
What most people get wrong
The dose. The amount conventionally sold is far below what the trials used, so “the trials showed it works” and “this is the dose” are not describing the same thing.
What Ipamorelin is
Ipamorelin is a synthetic pentapeptide — Aib-His-D-2-Nal-D-Phe-Lys-NH2 — that binds and activates the growth hormone secretagogue receptor, GHS-R1a. It was developed at Novo Nordisk and first described in 1998 under the code NNC 26-0161.
Three of its five residues are not among the twenty amino acids the body builds proteins from. That is what makes the molecule resistant to the enzymes that would otherwise clear it in seconds, and it is also why characterising it is harder than characterising an ordinary peptide: routine amino-acid analysis does not cleanly resolve non-proteinogenic residues, so a purity figure on ipamorelin depends more on the analytical method than it does for most compounds. When you read a certificate for this peptide, the method line matters as much as the percentage.
Free base or acetate — this one is not pedantry
Ipamorelin acetate dissolves readily in water. The free base does not: its limited aqueous solubility is significant enough that the US FDA raised it as an open question about whether an injectable could be formulated from the free base at all. Anything intended for reconstitution in bacteriostatic water should be the acetate salt.
The certificate for the lot we ship identifies the compound as ipamorelin and reports 99.96% purity by HPLC-UV with 11.09 mg of measured content. It does not state which salt, and most certificates in this market do not. Rather than infer it from solubility and call that a fact, we are treating it as an open question: this page will name the salt once the laboratory confirms it in writing. If it matters to your work, ask us before you order and we will tell you exactly what we know and exactly what we do not.
How it works
GHS-R1a is the ghrelin receptor. Ipamorelin occupies the same site the body's own ghrelin occupies, and activation drives a release of growth hormone from the somatotroph cells of the anterior pituitary. Everything downstream — IGF-1, and whatever IGF-1 goes on to do — follows from that pulse rather than from the peptide itself.
The pulse is single, and it saturates
This is the part of the pharmacology most worth understanding, because it constrains what any dosing schedule can achieve. In the one human pharmacology study ever published, every dose from the lowest to the highest produced one episode of growth hormone release, peaking at about forty minutes and then subsiding. Raising the dose did not produce a second pulse, a longer pulse, or a proportionally larger one: the response is saturable, with half-maximal stimulation at a plasma concentration of 214 nmol/L and a ceiling on growth hormone output above that.
A saturable single-pulse response is an argument against dose escalation on its own terms. Past the point where the receptor response tops out, more peptide buys nothing measurable and still carries whatever risk the compound carries.
"Selective — it doesn't raise cortisol or prolactin"
This is the single most repeated claim about ipamorelin, and it traces to exactly one paper: Raun and colleagues, 1998. That paper measured ACTH, cortisol, prolactin, FSH, LH and TSH, found ipamorelin left them alone at doses more than 200-fold above the threshold for growth hormone release, and concluded it was the first GHRP-receptor agonist with GHRH-like selectivity. It is a good paper and the finding is real.
It was done in primary rat pituitary cells, anaesthetised rats and conscious swine. The only human pharmacology study of ipamorelin ever published measured two things: ipamorelin and growth hormone. Cortisol has never been measured in a human being given ipamorelin. The selectivity claim is a well-supported animal finding presented almost everywhere as a human one.
And the appetite claim runs the other way
Ipamorelin is often sold as the growth hormone secretagogue that does not make you hungry. GHS-R1a is the ghrelin receptor, and stimulating appetite is that receptor's best-known central function. No human food-intake study of ipamorelin exists. The claim is not so much unproven as pointed against the mechanism, and we are not going to repeat it.
Pharmacokinetics
One published human pharmacokinetic study exists. Gobburu and colleagues gave forty healthy men — eight at each of five dose levels — fifteen-minute intravenous infusions and measured plasma ipamorelin and plasma growth hormone.
| Parameter | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal half-life | 2 hours | Gobburu 1999, IV infusion, healthy men |
| Time to peak GH | 0.67 h (about 40 min) | Same, at every dose level |
| GH response | Saturable, SC50 214 nmol/L | Same |
| Doses studied | 4.21–140.45 nmol/kg IV | Roughly 3–100 mcg/kg |
| Subcutaneous bioavailability | No published value | Never measured, in any species, in the public literature |
Every human pharmacokinetic and trial dose of ipamorelin on record was given intravenously. No published study has administered it subcutaneously to a human being. That does not mean subcutaneous administration does not work — it means nobody has published what fraction of a subcutaneous dose reaches the circulation, so any conversion between an intravenous figure and a subcutaneous one is an assumption rather than a calculation.
What the evidence shows
Three human studies exist. One measured pharmacokinetics, one measured a clinical endpoint and missed it, and one has never been published.
| Study | Design | n | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gobburu 1999 | Phase 1 dose escalation, healthy men, IV | 40 | PK and GH release characterised. Half-life 2 h, single saturable pulse |
| Beck 2014 | Randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, bowel resection, IV 0.03 mg/kg twice daily | 114 | Primary endpoint not met. 25.3 h vs 32.6 h to tolerance of a solid meal, p = 0.15 |
| NCT01280344 | Phase 2b, randomised, placebo-controlled | 320 | Completed. Results never published. |
What the negative trial actually says
Beck and colleagues tested ipamorelin for post-operative ileus in patients recovering from bowel resection, dosing from the first post-operative day for up to a week. The drug was well tolerated. The authors reported no significant difference from placebo on the primary endpoint or on the secondary analyses. A seven-hour median difference that does not reach significance in 114 patients is not a hidden positive; it is a null result, and the programme did not continue past phase 2b.
The list of things never measured in a human
Not one of the outcomes ipamorelin is marketed for has been measured in a person in the published literature:
- IGF-1 response to repeated dosing
- Body composition — lean mass, fat mass, or either one
- Sleep quality or architecture
- Bone density
- Injury healing, tendon, ligament or otherwise
- Cortisol, prolactin or any other pituitary axis
- Appetite or food intake
- Blood glucose or insulin
The longest a human being has been given ipamorelin under study is seven days. There is no published human data of any kind about what happens beyond a week.
Reconstitution
A 10 mg vial, worked at the volumes people actually use, so you can check the arithmetic rather than take it:
| Bacteriostatic water | Concentration | 1 unit (U-100) = | 200 mcg draw |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 mcg | 4 units · 0.04 mL |
| 3 mL — our volume, and the vial's maximum | 3.33 mg/mL | 33.3 mcg | 6 units · 0.06 mL |
10 mg ÷ 2 mL = 5 mg/mL. At U-100, one unit is 0.01 mL, so one unit carries 5 mg/mL × 0.01 mL = 0.05 mg = 50 mcg. The calculator will do this for any volume you choose.
At small vial volumes the syringe becomes the limiting instrument — and the glass caps how far you can go
Reconstituted in 2 mL, a 200 mcg draw is four units on a U-100 syringe, and being one unit out is a 25% error. At 3 mL the same draw is six units and the same absolute misreading is a 16.7% error. More diluent buys precision at no cost beyond a slightly larger injection volume, so if you are working at the low end of the reported range, use the larger fill.
The vial itself holds 3 mL. That makes 3 mL both the most precise fill available and the maximum — there is no further dilution to reach for, however much the arithmetic might want it.
The salt-mass correction, if it applies
A vial labelled 10 mg is 10 mg of whatever was weighed out. If that material is the acetate salt, the peptide itself is about 92% of it by mass — 711.9 divided by 771.9 — so 11.09 mg of acetate carries roughly 10.2 mg of ipamorelin. If it is the free base, the two figures are the same. This is not a defect and it is not unique to us; it is arithmetic that applies to every peptide sold as a salt, and almost nobody prints it. It is also why the question in the first section is a real one rather than a chemistry footnote.
Direct the stream down the inside wall of the vial rather than onto the cake, swirl rather than shake, and label the vial with the resulting concentration — not the volume you added. The full method is in the reconstitution guide.
Reported protocols
The relationship between the trial doses and the doses in circulation is the opposite of what almost everyone assumes, and it is worth setting out plainly.
| Figure | Route | Per dose, 70 kg adult | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4.21–140.45 nmol/kg | Intravenous | 0.21–7.0 mg | Trial-derived. Gobburu 1999 dose-escalation range |
| 0.03 mg/kg twice daily | Intravenous | 2.1 mg, 4.2 mg/day | Trial-derived. Beck 2014 — the dose that did not beat placebo |
| 100–300 mcg | Subcutaneous | 0.1–0.3 mg | Convention. No primary source, no trial, no published subcutaneous data |
| Before bed, or two to three times daily | — | — | Convention. Rationale is alignment with nocturnal GH pulsatility; no timing study supports it |
| 8 to 12 week cycles | — | — | Convention. Longest studied human exposure is 7 days |
The community dose is lower than the trial dose, not higher
The usual assumption about a research compound is that people take more than the trials did. Here it is the reverse. The conventional 100–300 mcg subcutaneous dose sits at or below the lowest rung of the only human dose-escalation ever run, and roughly seven to twenty times below the daily dose used in the only efficacy trial — which itself missed its endpoint.
We are not telling you to take more. The saturable single-pulse pharmacology in the section above is a decent argument that more would not do much, and the trial that used more found nothing. The point is narrower and it cuts against our own commercial interest: anyone assuming the conventional dose is a conservative version of something clinically validated has it backwards. It is a different dose, by a different route, that no study has ever tested.
Storage
Lyophilised and sealed, kept cold, dark and dry, ipamorelin is a stable solid. The handling conventions in our storage guide apply. Those are conventions carried across from peptides generally, not published stability data for this compound — no reconstituted stability study for ipamorelin exists — and we label them as such rather than dressing them up.
Once reconstituted in bacteriostatic water, the limiting figure is microbiological rather than chemical: the benzyl alcohol preservative is tested and relied on for 28 days, and that is the number to work to for a multi-draw vial. It is not a claim that the peptide degrades on day 29; it is the interval the preservative system is actually validated for. There is more on where that figure comes from in our FAQs.
Do not freeze a reconstituted solution. Ice-crystal formation concentrates solutes at the freezing front and drives aggregation — and aggregation is precisely the risk the FDA named for this compound. The damage is invisible in the vial.
Reported effects
Beck 2014 reported ipamorelin as well tolerated across 114 patients dosed intravenously twice daily for up to a week. That is the entirety of the controlled human safety experience.
What the FDA said, and what it could not resolve
When the US FDA placed ipamorelin acetate in category 2 of its interim bulk drug substances list on 29 September 2023, it recorded two concerns. The first is immunogenicity: the potential for the peptide to aggregate or to carry peptide-related impurities, made harder to characterise by those non-proteinogenic residues. The second is a citation to serious adverse events, including death, when ipamorelin was given intravenously to improve gastric motility.
We could not reconcile that second point with the trial it appears to refer to. Beck 2014 is the intravenous gastric-motility study, it was conducted in patients recovering from bowel resection surgery, and it reports no significant safety difference between arms. Deaths in a post-surgical population occur in both arms of any trial. Whether the FDA's language reflects a causal attribution or a count of events in a sick population is not something we can determine from the published record, so we are not going to characterise it either way. Both statements are on the table; we have resolved neither.
Glucose — an inference, clearly labelled
No ipamorelin study has measured blood glucose or insulin in anything. Two independent mechanistic reasons exist to expect an effect anyway: ghrelin itself raises blood glucose and suppresses insulin secretion in humans, and growth hormone is a counter-regulatory hormone that opposes insulin's action. Both are well-established findings about other agents. Neither has been tested with this compound. That is a reason for anyone with impaired glucose tolerance to take the question seriously, and it is not a reason for us to state a finding that does not exist.
Toxicology
The FDA's own review identified no acute toxicity study, no repeat-dose toxicity study, no genotoxicity study and no carcinogenicity study for ipamorelin. There is no conventional toxicological package behind this compound at all.
Regulatory status
Approval. Ipamorelin is not an approved drug anywhere in the world. Development reached phase 2b and stopped.
United States. Ipamorelin acetate sits in category 2 of the FDA's interim bulk drug substances policy — substances that may present significant safety risks — added 29 September 2023.
Canada. Health Canada's public advisory of 9 April 2026 names ipamorelin among fourteen peptides sold online. That advisory states that peptides are generally regulated as prescription drugs in Canada, and that research-use-only labelling "does not make these products legal or exempt from regulatory requirements." Ipamorelin is not a controlled substance under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. We would rather point you at the advisory than summarise it for you, and it is linked in full in the references below.
Sport. The 2026 WADA Prohibited List, in force from 1 January 2026, names ipamorelin explicitly at section S2.2.4, among "growth hormone secretagogues (GHS) and their mimetics". Prohibited at all times, in and out of competition. Anyone subject to testing should treat it as banned. We read the list through the Austrian Federal Law Gazette's official reproduction of it, because WADA blocks automated access to its own copy — if your career depends on this, read the official PDF rather than our summary of it.
Sentient Biogenix supplies ipamorelin for laboratory research use only. It is not for human or veterinary use.
Questions we actually get
Does ipamorelin raise cortisol?
Nobody knows. It does not raise cortisol in rats or pigs, which is a real finding from a good 1998 paper and the source of every "selective" claim you will read. Cortisol has never been measured in a human given ipamorelin. Treat the selectivity as a promising animal result, because that is exactly what it is.
Why is the conventional dose so much lower than the trial dose?
We do not know, and neither does anyone else who is being straight with you. The convention has no traceable primary source. What we can tell you is that the pharmacology gives a plausible reason why a low dose might not be much worse than a high one: the growth hormone pulse saturates, so past a point extra peptide stops producing extra response.
Should I stack it with CJC-1295?
The rationale you will read for combining a secretagogue with a GHRH analogue comes from work on native GHRH plus GHRP-6 in the 1990s. It has never been tested with ipamorelin, and never with CJC-1295 in either form, in any published human trial. It is a class-level extrapolation. It may well be a reasonable one; it is not a demonstrated one, and it should not be sold to you as though somebody has checked.
Is the 10 mg vial fifty doses or a hundred?
At 200 mcg it is fifty; at 100 mcg it is a hundred. That is division, not a recommendation — see the calculator. Bear in mind that the preservative-limited 28-day window, not the vial size, is usually what decides how much of a vial gets used.
Why does this page read like an argument against the product?
Because the alternative is printing things that are not true. Ipamorelin has more human data behind it than most of what we sell, and almost none of that data supports what it is sold for. You are better served knowing that from us than discovering it later, and we would rather lose the sale than write the other version of this page.
References
- Raun K, Hansen BS, Johansen NL, et al. Ipamorelin, the first selective growth hormone secretagogue. European Journal of Endocrinology 1998;139(5):552–61. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov — sequence, GHS-R1a selectivity, ACTH and cortisol findings, species used.
- Gobburu JVS, Agersø H, Jusko WJ, Ynddal L. Pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modeling of ipamorelin, a growth hormone releasing peptide, in human volunteers. Pharmaceutical Research 1999;16(9):1412–16. link.springer.com — 2-hour half-life, 40-minute GH peak, saturable response, SC50, dose range, intravenous route, 8 subjects per dose level.
- Beck DE, Sweeney WB, McCarter MD, et al. Prospective, randomized, controlled, proof-of-concept study of the ghrelin mimetic ipamorelin for the management of postoperative ileus in bowel resection patients. International Journal of Colorectal Disease 2014;29(12):1527–34. link.springer.com — 114 patients, 0.03 mg/kg IV twice daily, 25.3 h vs 32.6 h, p = 0.15, no significant difference on key or secondary analyses.
- US Food and Drug Administration. Certain Bulk Drug Substances for Use in Compounding that May Present Significant Safety Risks. fda.gov — ipamorelin acetate, category 2, added 29 September 2023; immunogenicity, aggregation and characterisation concerns; the adverse-event language discussed above.
- Health Canada. Think twice before injecting peptides bought online: unauthorized products can seriously harm you. Public advisory, 9 April 2026. recalls-rappels.canada.ca
- ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT01280344 — phase 2b study, 320 participants, completed, results not published.
- World Anti-Doping Agency. The 2026 Prohibited List, in force 1 January 2026, section S2.2.4 — growth hormone secretagogues and their mimetics, ipamorelin named. Read via the Austrian Federal Law Gazette's official reproduction (BGBl. III Nr. 219/2025) because WADA blocks automated access to its own copy.
Every figure on this page traces to one of the sources above and each was opened and read rather than taken from a summary. Where a number in circulation has no primary source behind it — the 100–300 mcg convention, the cycling schedules, the timing rationale — this page says so instead of repeating it.
For laboratory research use only. Not for human or veterinary use. Nothing on this page is dosing guidance, and no figure here should be read as a recommendation.