CJC-1295 Dosage: What the Only Human Trial Used

"CJC-1295 dosage" looks like one question and is actually two, because the name covers two chemically different products. One of them — the original, albumin-binding DAC molecule its own discovery paper describes — has a genuine, subcutaneous, placebo-controlled human dose-ranging record, with named microgram-per-kilogram figures and a measured half-life. The other, sold as "CJC-1295 without DAC" or "Mod GRF 1-29," has nothing. Not a dose, not a schedule, and — per the one peer-reviewed source that has looked — not even a published route of administration in any human study. Our standalone evidence review covers why the two are different molecules; this article covers what each was, or was not, ever actually given at.

The doses the human trial actually administered

The only real human dosing study of CJC-1295 was a pair of randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind ascending-dose trials in healthy adults aged 21 to 61, run over 28 and 49 days, with the drug "administered sc" — subcutaneously, the route the market also uses¹. Its published abstract is unusually thin on the dose ladder, mentioning only "four ascending single doses" and concluding that the drug was safe and relatively well tolerated "particularly at doses of 30 or 60 microg/kg¹."

FDA reconstructed the full design when it evaluated CJC-1295 for compounding, and its evaluation document is the more complete source. In the single-dose study, the groups received 30, 60, 125, and 250 mcg/kg subcutaneously; 35 subjects got drug and 7 got placebo. Only the 60, 125, and 250 mcg/kg groups reached statistical significance against placebo on seven-day growth-hormone area under the curve, and IGF-1 "exceeded the age- and gender-adjusted normal ranges only in subjects receiving 250 mcg/kg³" — meaning the top rung was the only one that pushed a subject's IGF-1 outside the reference range at all.

The multiple-dose study is where the schedules live. Twenty-four subjects were split into four sequential dose-escalation groups of six, one placebo per group: "Group 1 received 30 mcg/kg on day 0 and 14, group 2 received 60 mcg/kg on day 0 and 14, group 3 received 30 mcg/kg on days 0, 7, and 14, and group 4 received 20 mcg/kg on days 0, 7, and 14³." Weekly or biweekly, never daily. The mean estimated half-life across subjects sampled for up to fourteen days ran 5.4 to 9.2 days, and — a detail that matters for any weight-based dosing claim — "the pharmacokinetic parameters were independent of body weight³."

FDA also totals the entire human exposure record across three studies published between 2006 and 2009: "a total of 63 healthy adults (87% of the subjects were men) received up to four SC injections (73% of subjects received one injection) of CJC-1295 DAC (unspecified form) at doses ranging from 30-250 mcg/kg³." Sixty-three people, most of them dosed exactly once. That is the complete human dosing base for this compound.

A tension in the safety record that a dosage page has to report

The trial's own abstract states, in its results: "No serious adverse reactions were reported¹." Read alone, that sounds like a clean tolerability record across the dose range.

FDA's read of the same single-dose study reports something the abstract does not: adverse events "in 33 of 35 (94%) subjects in the CJC-1295 DAC (unspecified form) group and in two of seven (29%) subjects in the placebo group³." Broken out, those were injection site reactions in roughly 70% of subjects on drug and rarely on placebo, transient urticarial rashes at the injection site in almost 30%, headache in 63% versus 14% on placebo, diarrhea in 43%, and systemic vasodilatory reactions — flushing, warmth, and transient hypotension — in 30%. The line that makes this a dosage finding rather than a safety footnote: "All AEs (with the exception of transient urticarial rashes) were more common at higher doses (125 or 250 mcg/kg)³." In the multiple-dose study, flushing was explicitly dose-dependent, at "40% after low-dose and 100% after high-dose injections³."

Both statements are accurate. "No serious adverse reactions" is a severity threshold; "94% had an adverse event" is an incidence count; and the two coexist without contradiction. This article reports both because a page about how much to take owes the reader the part where the side effects scaled with the amount.

Development stopped in 2006, and FDA says why

FDA's evaluation records something no marketing page mentions: "ConjuChem Biotechnology withdrew CJC-1295 DAC from clinical trials in 2006 after the death of a subject involved in a phase 2 trial³." That statement deserves reporting with the same precision FDA itself used. For it, FDA cites a ClinicalTrials.gov record and, in a footnote, what FDA's own document calls "the following two internet anecdotal reports³" — an HIV news site and a web archive. This article does not upgrade FDA's sourcing.

The registry record was fetched directly for this article. NCT00267527 is "A Study to Evaluate CJC 1295 in HIV Patients With Visceral Obesity," a Phase 2 study with a planned enrollment of 120, and its overall status is Terminated — with no reason for termination published on the record at all⁶. So: the registry independently confirms a terminated phase 2 trial of this exact compound in that exact year's development program, and states no reason; FDA reports the reason, and flags the quality of its own sources for it. Both facts belong in the answer, and neither is the same as a demonstrated causal finding about the drug.

The variant with no dose at all

Everything above describes CJC-1295 with DAC. The version far more commonly sold — and, per the same review, the one "typically" used when CJC-1295 is paired with ipamorelin — is the non-DAC form, and its dosing record is not thin, it is empty.

A 2026 peer-reviewed narrative review (a review, not a trial) built a table grading each compound's human evidence base. Its route-and-pharmacokinetics cell for CJC-1295 without DAC reads, in full: "No peer-reviewed clinical studies in humans have reported the route of administration; t½ not reported in human studies⁵." Its safety cell and its effect cell both read "No peer-reviewed human studies," and it lands in the review's lowest evidence tier, D⁵. There is no half-life to time an injection against, no dose-response curve, and no published human study that even establishes how the compound was given. Our article on the pairing itself covers why that specific variant dominates the blended products.

What circulates as a "CJC-1295 dose," and where it comes from

The same 2026 review does something genuinely useful: it puts clinical dosing and internet self-administration protocols in separate columns of the same table, so neither can be mistaken for the other. For CJC-1295 with DAC, the clinical column reproduces the trial regimen — "30 or 60 µg/kg SC, 2–3 times weekly or biweekly" — and the other column reports "Bodybuilding-related forums: 1–2 mg/week SC in 1–2 injections; typical cycles: 8–12 weeks or 12–16 weeks on, followed by 4–6 weeks off." For CJC-1295 without DAC, there is no clinical column entry at all; the only row is "Bodybuilding-related forum: 100–200 µg per injection SC, 1–2 times daily, often used in combination with Ipamorelin to increase pulsatile GH release; preferably post-strength training⁵."

The review states plainly what that table is, and the sentence is worth quoting in full rather than paraphrasing: "The online protocols included in this table are not evidence-based treatment strategies, MUST NOT be interpreted as clinically validated or safe, and are presented solely as anthropological/behavioral data describing self-administration practices and the informational environment encountered in real-world clinical care⁵."

Set the two DAC-form columns side by side and the gap is measurable, as arithmetic on published numbers rather than as a judgment. The trial's 30 µg/kg works out to about 2.1 mg per injection for a 70 kg adult and 60 µg/kg to about 4.2 mg — administered twice or three times over a fortnight. The circulating figure, 1 to 2 mg a week, is roughly two to four times lower per week than the tested regimen, and it is a flat dose rather than a weight-based one, which the trial's own finding that pharmacokinetics were independent of body weight arguably supports and which no study has tested. Neither number is a recommendation here; the point is that they are not the same number, and only one of them was ever measured in a person.

What FDA found when it looked at the product itself

FDA evaluated all five nominated CJC-1295 forms "to compound drug products for subcutaneous (SC) injection administration in a 2,000 mcg/mL concentration³" — 2 mg/mL. Then it reported a problem with that concentration for the plain free base: "Because the BDS reportedly has limited solubility in water, it may not be possible to formulate the proposed injectable dosage form at the concentration of 2 mg/mL³." FDA also could not determine which chemical form the human studies had used: "It appears that all the available references refer to CJC-1295 DAC (free base) as the active moiety, but they do not specify a salt³." When the agency reading the primary literature cannot pin down which molecule was dosed, a vial label claiming a precise strength of "CJC-1295" is describing something the published record does not resolve.

The only repeated-daily-dosing data that exists for this compound is in animals, and it is not reassuring. FDA's nonclinical section reports that "local injection site safety signals characterized by hemorrhage, inflammation, and necrosis were consistently observed in rats and dogs treated with repeated daily SC injections of CJC-1295 DAC (unspecified form; doses ≥ 0.25 mg/kg) up to 14 days," alongside genotoxic signals from in vitro work in primary mouse pituitary cell cultures³. Those are rats, dogs, and cultured cells — stated as such, and not scaled into a human figure here. The compound's original 2005 discovery paper is likewise rat pharmacology: subcutaneous administration to Sprague Dawley rats, a four-fold increase in GH area under the curve over unmodified hGRF(1-29), and plasma presence "beyond 72 h²."

Regulatory status, checked live

A DailyMed search returns zero results for CJC-1295 against a database published August 6, 2026 — no FDA-approved product exists in any form, so there is no label with a dosage section⁷. FDA's Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee briefing document for its December 4, 2024 meeting proposes, in five separate numbered items, that CJC-1295 free base, CJC-1295 acetate, CJC-1295 DAC free base, CJC-1295 DAC acetate, and CJC-1295 DAC trifluoroacetate each "NOT be included on the 503A Bulks List⁴." FDA's current 503A Bulks List, updated May 14, 2026 and text-extracted in full for this article, contains no CJC-1295 entry in any of its three categories⁸.

Banned in tested sport, at any dose

WADA's 2026 Prohibited List names CJC-1295 explicitly under section S2.2.4, among "growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH) and its analogues," in a class headed "PROHIBITED AT ALL TIMES (IN- AND OUT-OF-COMPETITION)" and flagged "All prohibited substances in this class are non-Specified Substances⁹." No dose threshold applies, and the listing does not distinguish the DAC form from the non-DAC form.

The bottom line

CJC-1295's dosing question splits cleanly along the DAC line, and the honest answer differs on each side. The DAC form has a genuine subcutaneous human dose-ranging record: 30, 60, 125, and 250 mcg/kg as single doses, and weekly or biweekly 20 to 60 mcg/kg schedules in the multiple-dose study, in a combined population of 63 healthy adults most of whom were dosed once. Adverse events in that program were common — 94% of subjects on drug in the single-dose study — and scaled with the dose, even though no reaction was classified as serious. The non-DAC form, which is the one most often sold and most often blended with ipamorelin, has no published human dose, no half-life, and no reported route. Development of the DAC molecule stopped in 2006, and FDA reports that it stopped after a subject died in a phase 2 trial, citing sources it labels anecdotal alongside a registry record that confirms the termination without stating a reason. There is no reconstitution calculator for CJC-1295 on this site — an honest gap, since neither variant has an FDA-set vial strength for a calculator to check anything against. For the closest prescribable, board-reviewed compound on this axis, our sermorelin provider rankings cover the one GH-axis category this site has actually reviewed sellers for, and our three-way comparison sets all three peptides against each other.