AOD-9604 + CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin

Where the name "AOD-9604 + CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin" comes from

This three-part name is community and market usage that Peptide Health Lab neither coined nor endorses. The page exists because the joined name is a search people run, and answering the search honestly is more useful than leaving it to be answered by whoever is selling something.

A PubMed search on 1 September 2026 for (AOD9604[tiab] OR "AOD-9604"[tiab]) AND (CJC-1295[tiab] OR CJC1295[tiab]) AND ipamorelin[tiab] returned 3 records, all narrative reviews, none of which proposes the trio, defines its composition or claims the name — so on that date and in that database the origin is undocumented, and this page invents none. What the literature does record is that the three circulate. A 2026 narrative review of performance-enhancing peptides acting on the growth hormone–IGF-1 axis lists, in a single sentence of its abstract, growth hormone-releasing hormone analogues including CJC-1295 with a drug affinity complex and CJC-1295 without one, growth hormone secretagogues including ipamorelin, and the growth hormone fragment AOD-9604 (hGH 176-191) — as separate entries in a catalogue of agents encountered in clinical practice and in online self-administration, never as a trio.^[1]

Dosing and protocol ranges are not on this page. They are on the individual compound pages, where each molecule's administration record can be described in the species, population and route that produced it.

What's in it and why people combine them

The third name is what makes this page different from the two-compound one, and what it adds is a molecule rather than evidence. AOD-9604 is a C-terminal fragment of human growth hormone; the 2026 review names it as hGH 176-191.^[1] Its best-known experiment treated obese (ob/ob) and lean C57BL/6J mice for 14 days with the whole hormone, with the fragment, or with saline. Both the hormone and the fragment significantly reduced body weight gain, with increased fat oxidation and raised plasma glycerol — and, in the half of the result that usually goes missing, the fragment did not induce hyperglycaemia or reduce insulin secretion the way the whole hormone did, and it did not compete for the growth hormone receptor at all.^[2] That experiment is the origin of both the enthusiasm and the confusion: it is a mouse study, and it is a study of a fragment that does not act through the receptor the parent hormone acts through.

The sentence people quote for it is about a different peptide. The claim that the compound increased lipolytic activity in isolated adipose tissue from obese rodents and humans comes from work on AOD-9401, which its authors describe as a synthetic lipolytic domain containing residues 177-191, tested by oral administration in ob/ob mice for 30 days with adipose tissue assayed ex vivo.^[3] AOD-9401 and AOD-9604 are different code names for different synthesised peptides, and a result about one is not a result about the other. Checking the author lists of the two papers before saying anything about independence is worth the minute it takes: they share their first author and their last author, so the human-tissue line and the mouse weight line come from the same laboratory rather than from two.

CJC-1295 and ipamorelin are the growth-hormone-axis half of the name, a releasing-hormone analogue and a secretagogue. The identity problem is on this side too: the 2026 review lists the form with a drug affinity complex and the form without one as two separate agents, which means the name on this page does not by itself say which molecule is meant.^[1] A PubMed search on 1 September 2026 for ipamorelin AND (randomized controlled trial[pt] OR clinical trial[pt]) returned 2 records, and the one carrying a clinical endpoint tested the compound for postoperative ileus and did not separate from placebo.^[5]

The reason given for joining the three is that a fragment aimed at fat metabolism sits beside two compounds aimed at the growth hormone axis. That is an arrangement of intentions, and the searches set out in the next section returned no record on 1 September 2026 in which any measurement corresponds to it.

What the evidence says about the combination

Adding a third compound to a two-compound name adds a third literature. It does not add a combination result, and it cannot inherit one.

On 1 September 2026, a PubMed search for AOD9604 AND CJC-1295 AND ipamorelin returned 3 records; the synonym-widened form (AOD9604 OR "AOD-9604" OR "hGH fragment 176-191" OR "hGH 177-191" OR LAT8881) AND (CJC-1295 OR CJC1295 OR "modified GRF") AND ipamorelin returned the same 3; the three-way search narrowed with combination terms, AOD9604 AND CJC-1295 AND ipamorelin AND (combination OR combined OR "co-administration" OR "co-administered" OR "administered together" OR stack OR synergy), returned 1; (AOD9604 OR "AOD-9604") AND ipamorelin AND (combination OR combined OR "co-administration") returned 0; and AOD9604 AND ipamorelin returned 4, the three reviews plus a urine peptide-screening methods paper. Every one of those records names the compounds separately, and none of them, on that date and in that database, reports the three administered together in any species for any endpoint.

The single record returned by the three-way combination-term search is that 2026 narrative review, and what it actually does is instructive. It sorts these agents into evidence tiers running from regulatory-grade randomized trial data down to a complete absence of human studies, and it names all three of this page's compounds in the same catalogue sentence — which is a co-mention in a review, not a study of a combination.^[1] The distance between "named together in a review" and "tested together" is the whole subject of this section.

The component records do not close that distance either, and it is worth seeing what each one is on its own terms. For the fragment, a 2004 drug-pipeline review records that a phase IIa obesity programme was under way by February 2002.^[4] A PubMed search on 1 September 2026 for AOD9604 AND (randomized controlled trial[pt] OR clinical trial[pt]) returned 0 records, so no trial report from that programme is retrievable by publication type — a programme that ran and left no indexed trial publication is a gap where evidence would be, not evidence either way. For the secretagogue, the trial-typed search named above returned 2 records, and the one with a clinical endpoint missed it.^[5]

That is why the combination's own claim above is graded anecdotal. Three component literatures, one of them rodent-only and partly attributed to a different peptide, one of them an unpublished programme, and one of them a negative randomized trial for an unrelated indication, do not sum to evidence about the three given together. A grade for the combination has to be a grade for the combination.

Where the evidence is weak

The added component's evidence is rodent, single-laboratory, and partly somebody else's. The mouse weight study and the adipose-tissue study share their first and last authors, checked against the author lists rather than assumed, so the two most-cited results for this fragment are not two independent observations.^[2][3]

The most persuasive-sounding fact in the fragment's marketing is about AOD-9401. "Obese rodents and humans" is the phrase that carries it, and it belongs to the paper on the 177-191 domain, in isolated tissue, not to AOD-9604 in a person.^[3]

The human programme is not a result in either direction. A phase IIa programme is recorded as under way by February 2002.^[4] A PubMed search on 1 September 2026 for AOD9604 AND (randomized controlled trial[pt] OR clinical trial[pt]) returned 0 records, so on that date and in that database no trial report from that programme was retrievable by publication type. A reader should not read the silence as a negative result any more than as a positive one; it is silence.

Two of the three names do not fix a molecule. The 2026 review lists the drug-affinity-complex form and the form without one as separate agents.^[1] A name that does not determine which molecule is in question cannot carry evidence about a specific one.

The combination-term searches return one review and one zero. On 1 September 2026 the three-way combination-term search returned 1 record, a narrative review, and (AOD9604 OR "AOD-9604") AND ipamorelin AND (combination OR combined OR "co-administration") returned 0 — so on that date and in that database nothing indexed addressed efficacy, interaction, duration, safety or the behaviour of three of these compounds present at once.

Questions to bring to a provider

The productive version of this conversation is not "is the three-compound version better than the two-compound version." It is "what am I trying to change, and what has been measured against it."

• Is the goal fat mass, lean mass, recovery, or something else? What does the standard-of-care evidence offer for that specific outcome, measured directly rather than through a hormone concentration?
• The fragment's fat-loss evidence is mice, and a 2004 drug-pipeline review records its phase IIa obesity programme as under way by February 2002.^[4] A PubMed search on 1 September 2026 for AOD9604 AND (randomized controlled trial[pt] OR clinical trial[pt]) returned 0 records, so nothing from that programme is retrievable by publication type. What would have to exist for the fragment to be worth considering ahead of an option that has been evaluated?
• The lipolysis-in-human-adipose-tissue line comes from a paper on AOD-9401, a different synthetic peptide sequence of human growth hormone, measured in isolated tissue rather than in a person.^[3] Does the reasoning survive that substitution?
• Which CJC-1295 molecule is meant, and what would confirm it? A name that covers two agents cannot answer that on its own.
• Are you subject to anti-doping testing through competition, employment or a governing body? All three compounds here are named on the current Prohibited List, so that question comes before every other question on this page.

Anti-doping status

All three compounds this name joins are named on the World Anti-Doping Agency Prohibited List in force for 2026, in two adjacent subsections of section S2:

• AOD-9604: section S2.2.3, growth hormone, its analogues and fragments. The List names it in the line reading "growth hormone fragments, e.g. AOD-9604 and hGH 176-191".
• CJC-1295: section S2.2.4, growth hormone releasing factors. The List names it in the line reading "growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH) and its analogues (e.g. CJC-1293, CJC-1295, sermorelin and tesamorelin)".
• Ipamorelin: section S2.2.4, growth hormone releasing factors. The List names it in the line reading "growth hormone secretagogues (GHS) and their mimetics [e.g. anamorelin, capromorelin, ibutamoren (MK-677), ipamorelin, lenomorelin (ghrelin), macimorelin and tabimorelin]".

Section S2, peptide hormones, growth factors, related substances, and mimetics, carries the heading "PROHIBITED AT ALL TIMES (IN- AND OUT-OF-COMPETITION)", and the class statement immediately beneath it reads "All prohibited substances in this class are non-Specified Substances". Both entries also appear in the List's own index. These statuses were read on 1 September 2026 from the 2026 Prohibited List International Standard itself — the World Anti-Doping Agency's published PDF, reached from the United States Anti-Doping Agency's prohibited-list page — and from no research paper.

Section S0 does not arise for any component here. S0 reaches a substance "not addressed by any of the subsequent sections of the List", and all three are addressed by name in a subsequent section. That is a narrower and easier determination than the one a page has to make about an unnamed compound, and it is the reason no approval-status analysis appears above: for these three, the List answers the question directly. Absence from the List is still never a statement that something is permitted, and any compound not named there belongs to a national anti-doping organization to answer rather than to a page like this one.

The literature will not settle a tested athlete's real problem either. The 2026 review that catalogues these agents describes uncertainty about what an unregulated product actually contains as a clinical problem in its own right, alongside the absence of regulatory approval for performance-related indications.^[1] The List is reissued annually and its sections renumber between editions, so a competing athlete should confirm the current year's list rather than this page.