CJC-1295 is a synthetic version of growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH), the natural signal your hypothalamus sends to the pituitary to release growth hormone. It was developed by the Canadian biotech ConjuChem in the early-to-mid 2000s. The whole point of the molecule was to fix a practical problem: natural GHRH and its short fragments break down in the blood within minutes, so the engineers rebuilt it to survive for days.
What it is and how it's built
The peptide is based on GRF(1-29), the first 29 amino acids of GHRH (the same active fragment used in the approved drug sermorelin). CJC-1295 carries four amino acid substitutions, usually written as D-Ala2, Gln8, Ala15, and Leu27. These changes make it resistant to dipeptidyl peptidase IV (DPP-IV), the enzyme that normally chops up GHRH almost immediately.
The feature that defines the original CJC-1295 is its Drug Affinity Complex (DAC): a maleimidopropionyl group attached to a lysine at the end of the chain. Once injected, the DAC reacts with circulating serum albumin and binds to it covalently. The peptide essentially hitches a ride on a large, long-lived blood protein, which shields it from clearance. That is what stretches the half-life from minutes to days.
A note on naming, because it causes real confusion. "CJC-1295" in the literature means the DAC version. The product many vendors sell as "CJC-1295 without DAC" is chemically Modified GRF(1-29) (sometimes called mod GRF 1-29 or CJC-1295 no-DAC), which lacks the albumin-binding tail and therefore clears in minutes, not days. They are not the same molecule.
Mechanism of action
CJC-1295 binds the GHRH receptor on somatotroph cells in the anterior pituitary. That activates adenylate cyclase, raises intracellular cAMP, and stimulates the synthesis and pulsatile release of growth hormone, which in turn raises insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) from the liver. Because it acts on the body's own GHRH receptor rather than supplying growth hormone directly, GH release stays somewhat pulsatile rather than flat.
What the human research shows
The core published human data come from one study: Teichman and colleagues, *Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism*, 2006. These were two randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, ascending-dose trials in healthy adults, lasting 28 and 49 days.
What they measured:
- The estimated half-life was 5.8 to 8.1 days.
- A single injection produced dose-dependent increases in mean plasma GH of 2- to 10-fold for six days or more.
- Mean plasma IGF-1 rose 1.5- to 3-fold for 9 to 11 days after a single dose.
- With repeated dosing, mean IGF-1 stayed above baseline for up to 28 days.
- The authors reported no serious adverse reactions and described it as safe and relatively well tolerated, particularly at 30 or 60 µg/kg.
That is a real, citable result, but it is essentially one short-term safety-and-pharmacokinetics study in a small number of healthy volunteers. There is no large or long-term human evidence base on disease outcomes, body composition, or safety over months and years. Earlier supporting work showed that once-daily CJC-1295 normalized growth in GHRH-knockout mice (Alba et al., Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab, 2006).
Why development stopped
CJC-1295 reached Phase II trials, reportedly for indications including lipodystrophy and growth hormone deficiency. Development was discontinued after the death of a trial subject. Per the public account, the attending physician attributed the death to pre-existing coronary artery disease judged unrelated to the drug. Whatever the cause, the program ended there. CJC-1295 was never approved by the FDA or any other major regulator and is effectively an abandoned drug candidate. It is not an approved medicine anywhere.
For comparison, a different long-acting GHRH analog, tesamorelin, did complete development and is FDA-approved (for HIV-associated lipodystrophy). CJC-1295 did not get there.
Regulatory and anti-doping status
- No approval for human use. CJC-1295 is sold as a research chemical and is not approved for human consumption. Material in this category is research-use-only.
- WADA: prohibited. Growth hormone-releasing factors and their analogs, with CJC-1295 named alongside CJC-1293, sermorelin, and tesamorelin, fall under Section S2 of the WADA Prohibited List. They are banned at all times, in and out of competition. Any athlete in a tested sport should treat it as prohibited.
The buyer's quality problem
Because CJC-1295 is unapproved and sold through gray-market channels, there is no regulated manufacturing standard behind it. Two specific risks recur with this peptide:
- Identity confusion. As noted above, "CJC-1295" and "CJC-1295 no-DAC" are different molecules with wildly different durations. A vial labeled one way may contain the other.
- Purity and content. Independent testing of research peptides frequently turns up products that are under-dosed, degraded, or contaminated, and label claims that don't match the vial.
This is why a third-party certificate of analysis (COA) matters: it documents identity (often by mass spectrometry) and purity (typically by HPLC) for a specific batch. peptideone aggregates public COAs and independent vendor ratings so you can compare what's actually been tested rather than trusting a label. We don't sell anything, we don't test anything ourselves, and we report what the documents say.
Nothing here is medical, dosing, or efficacy advice. CJC-1295 is an unapproved compound with a single short human study behind it, a discontinued clinical program, and a prohibited status in sport. Those are the documented facts.