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CJC-1295: what the research shows, and what it doesn’t

By Pinnacle Pulse Editorial Team · Status as of 16 October 2026 · Next scheduled update: 14 January 2027

Short answer: CJC-1295 is a lab-made version of the brain hormone that tells the pituitary to release growth hormone, engineered to last longer in the blood. Small mid-2000s trials in healthy adults measured hormone levels, not health outcomes. It was never approved as a medicine. FDA lists serious adverse events, including a raised heart rate, among its concerns.

What CJC-1295 is

Your hypothalamus makes growth hormone-releasing hormone, GHRH. Its first 29 amino acids are enough to do the job, and that fragment (also sold for a time as the medicine sermorelin, see our sermorelin page) is the starting point here. The trouble with it is that it breaks down within minutes.

Researchers at ConjuChem, a biotech firm in Montreal, set out to fix that. Their 2005 paper in Endocrinology describes swapping four amino acids to make the peptide sturdier and attaching a chemical hook that grabs onto albumin, the most common protein in blood, once it is injected. Riding on albumin, the peptide stays around far longer. In rats it was still detectable in plasma after three days. They called the best of these compounds CJC-1295.

Here is the catch for anyone reading about it online. Sellers use “CJC-1295” for two different things: the albumin-binding molecule from the papers (often labeled “with DAC”) and a version without the albumin hook (“without DAC”), a different molecule. A 2026 clinical review in Frontiers in Endocrinology lists both separately. One of the 2006 trial reports describes its CJC-1295 as an analog that “binds permanently to endogenous albumin after injection”, so that study, at least, used the albumin-binding version.

What has been studied

Animals

Besides the rat work, a 2006 study in mice that lacked their own GHRH found that daily CJC-1295 normalized their growth. That is the kind of result you’d expect from a GHRH analog in an animal that has none of its own.

People

Two papers report human data, both from 2006 and both in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

The first, led by Sam Teichman with Lawrence Frohman as senior author, combined two randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trials in healthy adults aged 21 to 61, lasting 28 and 49 days. After a single injection, growth hormone and IGF-1 levels rose and stayed up for days, and the authors reported no serious adverse reactions. The outcomes were hormone concentrations and pharmacokinetics. Nobody’s muscles, sleep or recovery were measured.

The second, by Mirela Ionescu and Frohman, sampled blood every 20 minutes overnight in healthy men aged 20 to 40 before and a week after an injection. Growth hormone still came in pulses. What rose was the baseline between pulses. A 2009 paper analysed blood proteins from 11 healthy young men before and a week after an injection, looking for new markers of growth hormone activity.

That is about it. A PubMed search on 16 October 2026 for CJC-1295 limited to clinical trials or randomized trials returned exactly those two 2006 papers.

What happened next

CJC-1295 later turned up on the gray market. Someone nominated it for use by compounding pharmacies in the US, and the nomination was later withdrawn. FDA still lists it on its page of bulk substances that may present significant safety risks. The entry mentions possible immune reactions, peptide impurities, trouble characterizing the active ingredient, and serious adverse events “including increased heart rate and systemic vasodilatory reaction”. It adds that available clinical data are limited.

What the research does not show

None of the published trials tested whether CJC-1295 improves anything a person would notice or care about. They show that a hormone number went up, which is a different claim.

They don’t show long-term safety. The longest trial ran seven weeks, in healthy volunteers, under study conditions.

They don’t cover the “without DAC” product at all. If that is what is in a vial, the 2006 trials describe a different substance.

And they say nothing about what a gray-market product contains. FDA’s concerns about impurities and characterization are about exactly that.

Status as of 16 October 2026. EU and US: CJC-1295 is not an authorized medicine (no entry in EMA’s medicines data or in Drugs@FDA). FDA lists it among substances withdrawn from compounding nominations, with the safety concerns described above. WADA: the 2027 Prohibited List names CJC-1295 under S2.2.4 (growth hormone-releasing hormone and its analogues), prohibited at all times.

FAQ

Is CJC-1295 the same as sermorelin?

No, but they are related. Sermorelin is the natural 29-amino-acid fragment of GHRH. CJC-1295 is built on that fragment with four amino-acid changes and a group that binds albumin, which makes it last much longer.

Has CJC-1295 been tested in humans?

Only in small studies of healthy adults published in 2006, which measured growth hormone and IGF-1 levels. No trial has tested it as a treatment for a disease.

What safety concerns has FDA raised?

FDA cites possible immune reactions, impurities and difficulty characterizing the substance, serious adverse events including increased heart rate and a systemic vasodilatory reaction, and limited clinical data.

Sources

  • Jetté L, et al. Human growth hormone-releasing factor (hGRF)1-29-albumin bioconjugates activate the GRF receptor on the anterior pituitary in rats: identification of CJC-1295 as a long-lasting GRF analog. Endocrinology. 2005;146(7):3052-8. PMID 15817669
  • Alba M, et al. Once-daily administration of CJC-1295, a long-acting growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH) analog, normalizes growth in the GHRH knockout mouse. Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab. 2006;291:E1290-4. PMID 16822960
  • Teichman SL, et al. Prolonged stimulation of growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor I secretion by CJC-1295, a long-acting analog of GH-releasing hormone, in healthy adults. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2006;91(3):799-805. PMID 16352683
  • Ionescu M, Frohman LA. Pulsatile secretion of growth hormone (GH) persists during continuous stimulation by CJC-1295, a long-acting GH-releasing hormone analog. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2006;91(12):4792-7. PMID 17018654 (checked 16 October 2026)
  • Sackmann-Sala L, et al. Activation of the GH/IGF-1 axis by CJC-1295, a long-acting GHRH analog, results in serum protein profile changes in normal adult subjects. Growth Horm IGF Res. 2009;19:471-7. PMID 19386527
  • Dominikowski A, et al. The emerging landscape of performance-enhancing peptides modulating GH-IGF1 axis. Front Endocrinol. 2026;17:1822475. PMID 42395176
  • PubMed search “CJC-1295 AND (clinical trial[pt] OR randomized controlled trial[pt])”, run 16 October 2026 via NCBI E-utilities: 2 records.
  • FDA. Certain bulk drug substances for use in compounding that may present significant safety risks (content current as of 22 April 2026). fda.gov
  • WADA. 2027 Prohibited List, class S2.2.4. wada-ama.org
  • EMA. Download medicine data: table of all medicines assessed by EMA (Excel), checked 16 October 2026. ema.europa.eu
  • FDA. Drugs@FDA, database of FDA-approved drugs, checked 16 October 2026. accessdata.fda.gov

Facts last checked: 16 October 2026.

About this article

Written by: the Pinnacle Pulse Editorial Team, the people who make the Pinnacle Pulse app. We work only from primary sources such as regulators, legal texts, trial registries and PubMed, and we remove claims we can’t check against one.

This article has not been reviewed by a physician. It is general information, not medical advice.

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Change log

  • 16 October 2026: First published.

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