Last reviewed 26 August 2026
Three names travel together in every list this market produces, as if they were three flavours of one thing. They are not. Two are analogues of the same hypothalamic hormone — one of them a former licensed medicine, the other an abandoned drug candidate — and the third acts at a different receptor entirely and failed its only clinical-endpoint trial. This comparison sets out what each molecule is, what happened to each in development, and what each evidence base actually contains, drawn from our three library entries on the compounds, where every citation is resolved against its primary record.
Every statement here is a statement about a molecule’s structure, a regulatory record or a published study; none is a statement about what any compound does in anyone.
Three molecules, two mechanisms
The real dividing line runs between receptors, not names. Sermorelin is growth hormone-releasing hormone itself, cut down: the 29-residue GHRH(1–29) fragment — the shortest fragment of human GHRH that retains full activity at the GHRH receptor, which is why that sequence became the reference structure for the whole analogue series. CJC-1295 is that same 1–29 backbone with four deliberate substitutions — conventionally written [D-Ala², Gln⁸, Ala¹⁵, Leu²⁷] — each one removing a chemical liability of the native sequence, with an optional fifth change that matters more than all four (the next section). Ipamorelin shares no ancestry with either: it is a five-residue synthetic peptide (Aib-His-D-2-Nal-D-Phe-Lys-NH₂) acting as an agonist at the growth hormone secretagogue receptor GHS-R1a — the ghrelin receptor — described in its originating 1998 paper as “the first selective growth hormone secretagogue”, with GHRP-6 as its comparator.
The World Anti-Doping Agency’s own filing reflects the split precisely: all three are named at S2.2.4 of the Prohibited List, but CJC-1295 and sermorelin sit among the GHRH analogues (alongside CJC-1293 and tesamorelin) while ipamorelin sits in the separate sub-list of growth hormone secretagogues and their mimetics (alongside anamorelin, capromorelin, ibutamoren and ghrelin). All are prohibited in sport at all times, in and out of competition, as non-specified substances.
Three very different regulatory histories
Sermorelin is the only one of the three that has ever been an authorised medicine. It was approved in the United States as Geref — FDA records two new drug application approvals, dated 28 December 1990 and 26 September 1997 — used diagnostically and in treating growth hormone deficiency in children. In 2008 the manufacturer discontinued the products commercially, and a Federal Register determination of 4 March 2013 recorded that Geref was not withdrawn for reasons of safety or effectiveness — a distinction our library entry notes is frequently reported wrongly in both directions. No sermorelin product holds an authorisation anywhere today.
CJC-1295 never reached authorisation anywhere. Its clinical programme stopped at phase 2: in July 2006 a trial was halted following the death of a participant — attributed by the attending physician to pre-existing coronary artery disease rather than to the compound — and the programme was terminated as a precaution. No sponsor has taken it into trials since; the published record stops at phase 2, twenty years ago.
Ipamorelin never reached registration either. Developed by Novo Nordisk and later Helsinn, its development stopped at phase 2 after its one completed randomised controlled trial with a clinical endpoint — postoperative ileus in bowel-resection patients, 114 evaluable patients, published 2014 — reported no significant difference from placebo on its efficacy outcomes. As our library entry puts it: a negative trial is a result, not an absence of one, and it is the single most important item in that record.
What the three share: none is a controlled drug in the United Kingdom, none holds a marketing authorisation anywhere today, and none has a pharmacopoeial monograph in the BP, Ph. Eur. or USP — meaning every specification any supplier applies to any of them is the supplier’s own.
What the evidence bases actually contain
Sermorelin has something genuinely unusual in this field: a real human trial base, generated when it was a pharmaceutical product — the largest study followed 110 previously untreated growth-hormone-deficient children for twelve months. The base is real, and it is also old and narrow: concentrated in one paediatric population, mostly thirty years back, with endpoints belonging to that clinical context. Our entry’s key caveat is about identity, not history: every clinical study used material made to a marketing-authorisation specification, and research-grade powder does not inherit any of that by sharing a name — laboratory analysis of injectables seized in Europe found material sold as sermorelin that, on analysis, sometimes was not sermorelin.
CJC-1295’s human record is three small studies, all in healthy adults, all between 2006 and 2009, all measuring hormone concentrations rather than any clinical outcome, and two of the three involving the developing company’s investigators. There is no phase 3, no trial with a clinical endpoint of any kind, and no long-term safety data — the longest published human exposure is 49 days.
Ipamorelin’s human record is thinner still: one pharmacokinetic study in volunteers (terminal half-life about two hours) and the negative ileus trial. On the questions this compound is popularly associated with — body composition, sleep, recovery, ageing, performance — our entry is blunt: there is no controlled human evidence at all, in either direction. The animal literature (bone growth in rats, adiposity findings, models from ferrets to seabream) is a literature about those models.
The trap in one of the names
The comparison has a fourth participant hiding inside it. Two different molecules are traded as “CJC-1295”: the albumin-binding form carrying the drug-affinity-complex (DAC) group, and the unconjugated 29-residue peptide sold as “CJC-1295 without DAC” or “modified GRF(1–29)”. They have different CAS numbers, different formulae and a mass difference of roughly 279 Da — our entry’s words: The distinction is not a formulation detail; it is a different substance.
Everything notable in the human literature — the multi-day pharmacokinetics — belongs to the DAC form; most material traded under the name lacks the DAC modification, and there is no published human trial of the unconjugated form under either of its names. Anyone comparing “CJC-1295” to anything should first establish which CJC-1295 they are holding, from the certificate or the mass spectrum, not the label.
Where the combination fits
CJC-1295 and ipamorelin are commonly co-formulated — one GHRH-analogue backbone plus one GHS-R1a agonist in a single vial. Our catalogue carries the co-lyophilised blend (CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin 10mg), and its library entry is candid about what the pairing is: two separately named substances sharing a container, with separate registry identities, separate degradation chemistry and separate literatures — and nothing published that describes them as a combination. Sermorelin we do not stock; its entry exists because the library covers the field, not the shelf.
What this comparison does not settle
Nothing here ranks these molecules, because the honest ranking axis — evidence in humans for any use anyone actually cares about — has almost no entries on it for any of the three. The full identity data, handling chemistry, study-by-study literature and reference lists live in the entries this article compresses: sermorelin, CJC-1295 and ipamorelin. Everything NovoVita supplies is for laboratory research use only and is not for human or veterinary use; a library entry is documentation of the published record, not a product recommendation. This is analysis of records, not advice of any kind.
Sources
- NovoVita compound library: Sermorelin, CJC-1295, Ipamorelin and CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin — the full entries this comparison draws on, each with its complete verified reference list.
- Thorner M et al., the Geref International Study Group twelve-month trial in 110 growth-hormone-deficient children — cited in full in the sermorelin entry.
- Teichman SL et al. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2006;91(3):799–805, PMID 16352683; Ionescu M, Frohman LA. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2006;91(12):4792–7, PMID 17018654 — the CJC-1295 human studies.
- Jetté L et al. Endocrinology. 2005;146(7):3052–8, PMID 15817669 — identification of CJC-1295 as a long-lasting GRF analogue.
- Raun K et al. Ipamorelin, the first selective growth hormone secretagogue. Eur J Endocrinol. 1998;139(5):552–61, PMID 9849822; Beck DE et al. Int J Colorectal Dis. 2014;29(12):1527–34, PMID 25331030 — the postoperative-ileus randomised controlled trial.
- WADA Prohibited List 2026, section S2.2.4 — the explicit naming of all three compounds, in their separate sub-lists.