Selank: A Registered Anxiolytic That Has Never Been Compared to a Placebo

Selank is a real registered medicine, sold over the counter in Russian pharmacies as a 0.15% nasal spray and tested in four published anxiety trials. Not one of those trials included a placebo arm. Every comparator was a benzodiazepine.

That single design decision governs everything a buyer can conclude about this compound, and it is the fact most consistently omitted from the cognitive and neuroprotective peptides market. The registration is genuine. The institute behind it is genuine. The clinical literature is genuine and small. What none of it does is compare Selank against nothing, which is the comparison that decides whether an anxiolytic works.

Has Selank ever been tested against a placebo?

Selank has never been compared with a placebo in patients. All four published clinical trials in anxiety patients used a benzodiazepine comparator: medazepam in 62 patients, phenazepam in 60, and phenazepam add-on in 70. The only placebo-controlled Selank study on record is a 52-person resting-state fMRI experiment in healthy volunteers published in 2020, which measured brain connectivity rather than anxiety, and which states neither randomisation nor blinding in its abstract.

That imaging study is worth stating precisely because it is the ceiling of the placebo-controlled evidence. Panikratova et al., in Doklady Biological Sciences, put 52 healthy participants through resting-state functional MRI before and after Selank, Semax or placebo, and reported differences in functional connectivity between the right amygdala and the right temporal cortex.

A connectivity difference in people without anxiety is a surrogate endpoint. It shows the molecule does something detectable in a brain. It does not show that the something reduces symptoms, and the study population was chosen so that symptoms could not be measured.

What did the four human trials actually find?

Selank's four patient trials report anxiolytic effects and none of them reports a number to support it. Zozulya 2008 randomised 62 patients against medazepam and concluded the two drugs performed similarly; Medvedev 2014 ran 60 patients against phenazepam; Medvedev 2015 randomised 70 patients to phenazepam or phenazepam plus Selank; Uchakina 2008 tracked cytokines. All four appeared in Russian in one journal, and not one abstract publishes a p-value or an effect size.

Every one of them was published in Zhurnal Nevrologii i Psikhiatrii imeni S.S. Korsakova.

The 2008 Zozulya study is the one most often cited as establishing Selank's anxiolytic effect, so read what it actually claims. The anxiolytic effects of Selank and medazepam were similar, and Selank additionally had antiasthenic and psychostimulant effects. There is no placebo group, no stated non-inferiority margin and no power calculation in the abstract. In an anxiety trial, where placebo response rates routinely run 30–40%, "similar to an active drug" in 62 patients is not a demonstration of efficacy. It is a demonstration that two groups of about thirty people improved.

The 2015 study is the most interesting of the four and the least often quoted, because its finding is not what the marketing says. It is an add-on design: everyone received phenazepam, and the Selank group received Selank on top. The reported benefit is that the combination reduced the benzodiazepine's side effects, with less attention and memory impairment and less sedation. That is a plausible and useful result. It is also, structurally, a finding about phenazepam.

Is Selank an approved medicine?

Selank is approved in Russia and nowhere else. It is registered with Russia's Ministry of Health through the State Register of Medicines under certificate ЛП-№(010951)-(РГ-RU), held by JSC INPC "Peptogen" of Moscow, as a 0.15% nasal drop in a 3 mL bottle, ATC code N05BX, other anxiolytics. It is dispensed without prescription, and Peptogen states it became an over-the-counter medicine on 2 August 2017. No other regulator has approved it.

Peptogen was founded in 2005 with the participation of the Institute of Molecular Genetics, the institute that invented the molecule. Registered indications cover anxiety states: unmotivated worry, panic attacks, neurasthenia, asthenia, mood instability, sleep disturbance, adaptive disorders and stress prevention.

We could not verify the original year of first registration. The state register carries only the current, re-issued certificate under the EAEU format. Figures circulating online for a first registration year are not traceable to a primary source, and we are not going to print one.

What matters more is what a Russian registration is and is not. It is a national regulatory authorisation. It is not evidence that would satisfy the FDA, the EMA or a systematic reviewer, because the dossier behind it rests on the four trials above.

What Selank evidence does not exist

Four things are missing from the Selank record and each is verifiable by absence. There is no registered trial anywhere outside Russia, no human pharmacokinetic study, no trial run by a non-Russian institution, and no FDA evaluation of the compound. The practical consequence is specific: because no human pharmacokinetic study exists, there is no published plasma half-life for Selank, no bioavailability figure, and no measurement of how much of an intranasal dose reaches the brain.

ClinicalTrials.gov returns no genuine Selank study. A search on the intervention field returns two records, and both match on the EEG electrode positions "TP7" and "TP8" rather than on the compound. The EU Clinical Trials Register returns "Query did not match any clinical trials."

The pharmacokinetic gap is the one that should change how vendor copy reads. We searched PubMed for Selank pharmacokinetics and found five results, none of them human. Any percentage or half-life quoted in a product description is either extrapolated from rodents or invented. That matters most for the intranasal peptide guide questions buyers actually ask, because nose-to-brain delivery is precisely the claim with no human measurement behind it.

Selank has also never been reviewed by FDA's Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee. It appears in FDA's briefing material for Semax only to be excluded from scope as "a different peptide."

Is Selank on FDA's banned list?

No, and the reason matters more than the answer. FDA's page, content current 22 April 2026, lists fourteen substances in the active Category 2 group, and Selank acetate is not among them. It sits in a separate table on the same page headed "Bulk drug substances nominated but withdrawn." Selank came off the list because the nominator withdrew the nomination, not because FDA evaluated it and cleared it.

The active fourteen are cesium chloride, chloral hydrate, diethylstilbestrol, domperidone, edetate disodium, germanium sesquioxide, GHRP-2, GHRP-6, ibutamoren mesylate, ipamorelin acetate, kisspeptin-10, neomycin sulfate, quinacrine hydrochloride and tranilast. FDA introduces the second table with its own sentence: "This list of bulk drug substances previously in category 2 of the interim policies were withdrawn by the nominators."

So the accurate statement is that Selank acetate (TP-7) was nominated for compounding, was placed in Category 2 pending evaluation, and came off that list on a procedural withdrawal. It remains an unapproved new drug in the United States. It has no USP monograph and is not a component of any FDA-approved drug, which means it satisfies none of the three statutory routes for a bulk substance in 503A compounding. It is not legally compoundable. Our FDA peptide regulation timeline sets out how these lists moved.

Is Selank banned in sport?

Selank is not named on the WADA Prohibited List, and whether it is nonetheless prohibited is genuinely unresolved. We searched the full text of the 2026 Prohibited List, effective 1 January 2026, and neither "Selank" nor "tuftsin" appears anywhere in it. The catch-all S0 clause prohibits "any pharmacological substance... with no current approval by any governmental regulatory health authority for human therapeutic use." Selank holds exactly such an approval, from Russia.

On the literal wording, that Russian authorisation places Selank outside S0. Whether an anti-doping tribunal would read it that way is a different question, and we found no published WADA, ITA or USADA determination either way.

The practical instruction follows from the ambiguity rather than resolving it. Seek a ruling before competing rather than assuming one. Anyone who tells you confidently that Selank is banned, or that it is cleared, is going beyond the documents.

What is Selank, and what is it made from?

Selank is a synthetic heptapeptide, Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gly-Pro (TKPRPGP), molecular weight 751.9 g/mol, CAS 129954-34-3, developed under the code TP-7 at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is tuftsin with a tail: tuftsin (Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg) is a natural immunopeptide derived from the heavy chain of human immunoglobulin G, and Selank is that four-residue fragment with Pro-Gly-Pro attached at the C-terminus, an extension that slows enzymatic degradation.

The origin is stated plainly in the peer-reviewed literature by the people who made it. Filatova and colleagues, in Frontiers in Pharmacology in 2017, write that Selank "is a synthetic analog of the natural immunopeptide taftsin... and was developed at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the Zakusov Scientific Research Institute of Pharmacology."

A sourcing warning for anyone checking identity. ChemicalBook's Selank entry lists "PL14736" as a synonym. PL14736 is BPC-157, an entirely different peptide. Do not use that database as a synonym source for this compound.

Who developed Selank, and one name to delete

Content about Selank frequently attributes commentary to "Elena Yaroslavtseva" of the Institute of Molecular Genetics, and that person does not exist. The institute is real and is the genuine home of this research programme; the persona is fabricated. A PubMed author search returns five records under that surname, covering HIV cohort work in St Petersburg, entomopathogenic fungi and 1976 bacteriophage genetics, none of them connected to peptides, neuropharmacology or this institute. Treat any article quoting that name as unreliable throughout.

The real names are on the papers cited above and are easy to verify. Nikolay F. Myasoedov, of the Department of Chemistry of Physiologically Active Compounds at the Institute of Molecular Genetics RAS, is the through-line: a named author on the 2008 Zozulya trial, both Medvedev trials, the Uchakina immunology paper and the fMRI studies. Lyudmila A. Andreeva is his long-standing collaborator in the same department.

On the clinical side, Aleksandr A. Zozulya, G.G. Neznamov and Sergey B. Seredenin, who heads the Zakusov Institute named as co-developer, ran the anxiety programme, and Vladimir E. Medvedev ran the later trials. A fabricated attribution is a useful screening test in this category: content that invents an expert is rarely accurate about anything else.

What Selank dose has actually been studied?

The only dose with a documented basis is the registered one: two drops per nostril, three times daily, in 14-day courses of a 0.15% nasal drop. Nothing in the published literature tests what happens after a course ends, because every trial ran within that window. No human pharmacokinetic study exists, so there is no way to convert that regimen into an exposure figure, and no way to work backwards from an exposure figure to a different formulation.

That gap has a practical edge for anyone buying research-market Selank rather than the Russian pharmacy product. A 0.15% solution and a vial labelled in milligrams are different units describing different things, and the arithmetic between them depends on the volume you reconstitute into. The peptide dosing calculator and the reconstitution calculator handle that conversion, but neither can supply the missing pharmacokinetics.

Reduce or stop a course if adverse effects appear, since no controlled safety study exists to tell you what is expected and what is not.

Which Selank claims survive the evidence?

One Selank claim is straightforwardly true, one is false as it is usually stated, one is supported only inside a narrow context, and the remaining five are unestablished, untested or unmeasured. The registration is real. The anxiolytic claim is not established, because four active-comparator trials without placebo arms and without published p-values cannot establish it. The FDA safety-list claim is the one buyers most often repeat and it is wrong.

How do you verify Selank before you buy it?

Purity is not the problem with Selank; quantity is. The Purity Index records 99.63% average HPLC purity across 285 independent lab tests (verified August 2026) from seven named laboratories across 227 verified shops, which is a strong result on a large denominator. Tested content, however, ranges from −10.3% to +28.6% against the label, with one June 2026 test returning 12.86 mg in a vial labelled 10 mg.

The laboratories behind that figure are Vanguard, BTLabs, Horizon Analytical, Kovera, Ethos Analytics, ILS and MZ Biolabs. A 28.6% overage is not a bonus. It is direct evidence that fill accuracy is uncontrolled at that vendor, and the same process that overfills one vial underfills another, which is the mechanism explained in why 10 mg isn't 10 mg. Endotoxin reporting is sparse across the category.

Selank price data shows 77 shops in stock, median $4.50/mg and a lowest tracked price of $1.70/mg on a 10 mg vial (verified August 2026), across 84 live listings from 190 known sellers. Small vials of 2–8 mg run a median $6.00/mg; 10 mg and larger run $4.00/mg. Those figures exclude shipping, taxes and customs, coupon codes, bulk tiers, multi-vial kits and account-gated pricing.

Selank is short enough that mass spectrometry is the only test that establishes identity, and it is cheap and decisive at this mass: a 752 Da heptapeptide is trivially distinguishable from its own fragments. HPLC tells you a sample is homogeneous; it does not tell you what the sample is. See mass spectrometry for peptides and how to verify peptide quality before you buy for the method, compare vendors on the Selank compound page, and see where to buy Selank and Semax for the identity checks specific to this pair.

How does Selank compare with Semax?

Selank and Semax are two products of one design idea from one laboratory: take a short natural peptide and attach a Pro-Gly-Pro tail to slow its degradation. Selank's parent is tuftsin, an immunoglobulin G fragment; Semax's is ACTH(4-7). Selank weighs 751.9 g/mol against Semax's 813.93, and both hold Russian registrations. Neither has a placebo-controlled patient trial, and neither has any human pharmacokinetic data. Only Semax has been reviewed by an FDA advisory committee.

Semax has had far more regulatory attention, and that attention did not go well for it: see the Semax article for what FDA's own reviewers concluded. Our Semax versus Selank comparison covers the practical differences, and the intranasal peptide guide covers administration technique for both.

The trial that would settle this

Six design elements would settle the Selank question and no published study contains all six: a placebo arm, explicitly reported double-blinding, a diagnosed anxiety population outside Russia, a pre-registered primary endpoint with an effect size and a confidence interval, a duration longer than one 14-day course, and registration on a public registry before enrolment. Selank has none of them. Zero Selank trials appear on any public registry at all.

None of this is exotic. It is the standard package for a minor anxiolytic, and forty years after the molecule was made, nobody has run it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Selank an approved drug?

In Russia, yes — it is a registered over-the-counter nasal spray for anxiety disorders, made by Peptogen under certificate ЛП-№(010951)-(РГ-RU). It is not approved in the United States, the EU or anywhere else we could identify.

Does Selank actually reduce anxiety?

Four published trials in patients report anxiolytic effects, but every one of them compared Selank against a benzodiazepine rather than a placebo, and none published a p-value or effect size in its abstract. That design cannot separate a drug effect from a placebo effect. The honest answer is that it has not been tested in a way that could show this.

Is Selank on FDA's banned list?

No, and this is commonly misreported. Selank acetate was in Category 2 of FDA's interim compounding policy, but the current page — content as of 22 April 2026 — moves it to a separate table of nominations withdrawn by the nominators. It is still an unapproved new drug in the US and is not legally compoundable.

How much of an intranasal dose reaches the brain?

Unknown. No human pharmacokinetic study of Selank has been published. Any specific percentage you see quoted has no human source behind it.

Is Selank banned in sport?

It is not named on the WADA 2026 Prohibited List. Whether the catch-all S0 clause captures it is genuinely unclear, because S0 turns on having no approval from any governmental health authority and Selank holds a Russian one. No anti-doping body has published a ruling. Seek one before competing.

Is it safe?

Selank has been in over-the-counter use in Russia for years without a documented safety signal we could find, which is mildly reassuring. But no controlled safety study, no dependence or withdrawal study, and no human pharmacokinetic work exists — so "no evidence of harm" here means genuinely no evidence, not evidence of no harm.

Where this leaves Selank

Selank occupies an unusual position: real institutional provenance, a real national registration and a real clinical literature, all of which stops short of answering the only question a buyer has. Four trials were run in 62, 60 and 70 patients and an unstated fourth cohort. Placebos were not. The compound is sold over the counter in one country and cannot demonstrate, on its own published record, that it outperforms an inert nasal spray.

That is not a claim that Selank does nothing. It is a statement that the studies capable of showing otherwise were never done, and are still not being done anywhere in the world. Four decades of work by a serious research group produced a registered drug and an unanswerable question, and the two facts sit side by side in the same file.

Browse the cognitive and neuroprotective peptides category, or our complete peptide guide with 118 compounds (verified August 2026). For per-dose volume when reconstituting a vial, use the peptide dosing calculator alongside the reconstitution calculator. Compare shops through independent lab tests and community-verified shop reviews.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Peptides discussed may be investigational compounds not approved by the FDA (or equivalent regulators in your jurisdiction) for human use. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before using any peptide or research compound. Peptigrity is an independent review platform and does not sell, endorse, or recommend specific products or vendors.