CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin

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

"CJC-1295 + Ipamorelin" is community and market usage. Peptide Health Lab neither coined the name nor endorses it. This page exists because the joined name is what people type into a search box, and telling a reader what the name refers to is more useful than treating the search as though it were not happening.

The name is unusual among community combination names in one respect: it has reached the peer-reviewed literature as a single item. A 2026 narrative review in a sports-medicine journal lists "CJC-1295 + ipamorelin" in its own methods among the key injectable peptides it set out to evaluate, alongside BPC-157, TB-4, TB-500, tesamorelin and GHK-Cu.^[1] Appearing in a review's method section documents that the name is in circulation. It does not document where the name came from. A PubMed search on 1 September 2026 for the phrase forms "CJC-1295 + ipamorelin"[tiab] OR "CJC-1295/ipamorelin"[tiab] OR "CJC-1295 and ipamorelin"[tiab] returned 0 records, so on that date and in that database no indexed paper proposes the combination, fixes its composition, or claims the name, and this page invents no provenance for it.

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

What's in it and why people combine them

The name refers to one molecule; the literature studied another. Community usage of "CJC-1295" generally means the form without a drug affinity complex, written modified GRF(1-29). The paper that identified CJC-1295 identified something else: a tetrasubstituted derivative of human growth hormone-releasing factor (1-29) carrying a maleimidopropionamide group that bioconjugates in vivo to the free thiol on Cys34 of serum albumin. It was bioactive in cultured rat anterior pituitary cells, raised plasma growth hormone acutely in male Sprague Dawley rats, and remained in circulation beyond 72 hours.^[3] The human work followed the same bioconjugate: two randomized, placebo-controlled ascending-dose trials in healthy adults aged 21 to 61, whose main outcome measures were peak concentrations and area under the curve of growth hormone and IGF-I plus standard pharmacokinetic parameters.^[4] Peptide Health Lab keeps the two molecules on separate pages, and the cards above link them separately, for exactly this reason.

Ipamorelin is a selective growth hormone secretagogue, and it is the component with the rodent record that matters most on this page — see the next section, where the record turns out to be the study a reader looking for a combination study will land on. A PubMed search on 1 September 2026 for ipamorelin AND (randomized controlled trial[pt] OR clinical trial[pt]) returned 2 records, of which the one with a clinical endpoint tested it for postoperative ileus after bowel resection and did not separate from placebo on that endpoint.^[5]

The stated reason for naming them together is that they act at two different receptors on the same axis — a releasing-hormone analogue at the GHRH receptor and a secretagogue at the ghrelin receptor. That is an argument about pharmacology. Nothing in it is a measurement, and a page that let the argument stand in for a measurement would be doing the thing this page exists to avoid.

What the evidence says about the combination

A peer-reviewed review asserts a combination result. The searches for the study it describes return something else. Both halves belong here.

The assertion is real and checkable. The 2026 primer's abstract states that CJC-1295 combined with ipamorelin showed significantly improved maximum tetanic tension in murine models with glucocorticoid-induced muscle loss, and adds that the findings are limited to animal studies. The article's own stated study design is narrative review, and its abstract does not name the underlying study.^[1]

The searches are the other half. On 1 September 2026, a PubMed search for "maximum tetanic tension" AND "growth hormone" returned 1 record; a search for "tetanic tension" AND (dexamethasone OR glucocorticoid) AND (mice OR mouse OR murine) returned 12 records, of which the only growth-hormone-axis study was that same one; a search for ipamorelin AND (dexamethasone OR glucocorticoid OR methylprednisolone) AND (mice OR mouse OR murine) returned 4 records, three rat studies and the review itself; and a search for CJC-1295[tiab] AND (mice OR mouse OR murine OR rat OR rats) returned 7 records, none of them a muscle-function study.

The one record those searches keep returning is not a study of this combination. Groups of 8-month-old female rats were injected for three months with methylprednisolone, with ipamorelin, or with both. Maximum tetanic tension of the calf muscles, measured in a materials testing machine, increased significantly, and the periosteal bone formation rate rose four-fold, in the animals given the steroid and the secretagogue together compared with the steroid alone.^[2] CJC-1295 is not in it. The animals are rats. The combination it tested was a catabolic steroid with a secretagogue, which is a different question from the one the name on this page asks.

This page does not assert that no such study exists. It reports what those queries returned on the date they were run, and leaves the review's sentence standing as a sentence in a review rather than restating it as a finding about the combination.

That is why the combination's own claim above is graded anecdotal rather than animal_only. Evidence about CJC-1295 alone and evidence about ipamorelin alone do not add up to evidence about the two given together, however much of each there is. A PubMed search on 1 September 2026 for CJC-1295 AND ipamorelin returned 10 records and the widened synonym form returned 11, every one a review naming the two compounds separately or a doping-control assay; and the same title-and-abstract pair restricted to clinical-trial, randomized-controlled-trial, observational-study and case-report publication types returned 0.

Where the evidence is weak

The name and the molecule do not match, and the mismatch is not searchable. A PubMed search on 1 September 2026 for CJC-1295 AND (randomized controlled trial[pt] OR clinical trial[pt]) returned 2 records, both published in the same endocrinology journal in 2006 and both in healthy adults. The one this page leans on is the pair of randomized, placebo-controlled ascending-dose trials whose main outcome measures were growth hormone and IGF-I concentrations and standard pharmacokinetic parameters.^[4] The molecule in both is the one the founding paper identified: a tetrasubstituted derivative of hGRF(1-29) that bioconjugates in vivo to the free thiol on Cys34 of serum albumin.^[3] That is not the form the community name usually means. Searching for the distinction by name does not isolate it either. On the same date, a PubMed search for the quoted phrase "CJC-1295 without DAC" returned 1 record and the bare term CJC-1295 returned 33. That single hit is not a study of the form without a drug affinity complex, and the difference between 1 and 33 is not a measure of how little was published on it: PubMed does not hold the quoted words together, translating them instead into the CJC-1295 term ANDed with a dac term, and the record it returns is a 2026 review that writes both forms out in its own abstract while testing neither.

The human endpoints on the GHRH-analogue side are hormone concentrations. Growth hormone rose 2- to 10-fold and IGF-I rose 1.5- to 3-fold, for days at a time, in healthy adults. Those are the measurements. No clinical outcome — strength, body composition, recovery, function — was an outcome measure in either trial.^[4]

The trial-typed human record for the secretagogue is two records, and the one with a clinical endpoint missed it. Time from first dose to tolerance of a standardized solid meal was a median 25.3 hours against 32.6 hours on placebo, p = 0.15, and the authors state there were no significant differences between ipamorelin and placebo in the key or secondary efficacy analyses.^[5] The trial was well tolerated. It was also in bowel-resection patients, for an indication nobody reaches this combination name for.

The rodent result is a rescue result, not a performance result. The tetanic tension gain was measured against animals receiving a catabolic steroid, in 8-month-old female rats, over three months.^[2] What a secretagogue does to muscle strength in an animal being actively catabolized is a different measurement from what it would do in a person who is not.

The combination-term search returns five reviews, and one of them is the assertion itself. A PubMed search on 1 September 2026 for CJC-1295 AND ipamorelin AND (combination OR combined OR "co-administration" OR "co-administered" OR "administered together" OR stack OR synergy) returned 5 records, every one of them a review article. Four name the two compounds as separate agents in a catalogue of peptides — one of those four a scoping review whose method is a PRISMA-screened database search, the other three self-described narrative or critical reviews. The fifth is the 2026 primer discussed above, which names "CJC-1295 + ipamorelin" as a single item among the key peptides its method section set out to evaluate and states the murine tetanic-tension result without naming a study behind it.^[1] On that date and in that database, none of the five reports an experiment in which the two were administered together. A review that names two compounds in one article, whether separately or as a pair, has not administered them to anything.

Questions to bring to a provider

The useful conversation is not "is this combination worth trying." It is "here is the outcome I actually want, and here is what has been measured against it."

• What is the target — strength, recovery, body composition, sleep, something else? And what does the standard-of-care evidence offer for that specific outcome, measured as that outcome rather than as a hormone concentration?
• The human studies on the GHRH-analogue side took peak concentrations and area under the curve of growth hormone and IGF-I, plus standard pharmacokinetic parameters, as their main outcome measures.^[4] What would have to be measured for you to know whether the thing you care about changed?
• The review's sentence about improved tetanic tension is doing most of the work in most versions of this argument. The record the searches above return is a three-month experiment in 8-month-old female rats, giving one of the two compounds against methylprednisolone.^[2] What does the reasoning look like once that substitution is made?
• Which molecule is actually meant — the albumin bioconjugate that every published study used, or the form the community name usually refers to? What would confirm which one is in front of you?
• Is anti-doping testing part of your life at all — competition, employment screening, a governing body? That question comes before every evidence question below it.

Anti-doping status

Both compounds this name refers to are named on the World Anti-Doping Agency Prohibited List in force for 2026, in the same subsection:

• 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, is headed "PROHIBITED AT ALL TIMES (IN- AND OUT-OF-COMPETITION)", and the class statement beneath that heading reads "All prohibited substances in this class are non-Specified Substances" — a different sanctioning category from the Specified Substances of section S0. These statuses were read on 1 September 2026 from the 2026 Prohibited List International Standard itself, retrieved as the World Anti-Doping Agency's published PDF by way of the United States Anti-Doping Agency's prohibited-list page, and not from any research paper.

Two details matter more here than on most pages. First, the List names CJC-1295 without distinguishing the albumin bioconjugate from the form without a drug affinity complex, and the S2 preamble reads on "The following substances, and other substances with similar chemical structure or similar biological effect(s)" — so the identity question this page spends its length on does not create an anti-doping gap. Second, section S0 does not arise for either compound: S0 reaches a substance "not addressed by any of the subsequent sections of the List", and both are addressed by name at S2.2.4.

Absence from the List is never a statement that something is permitted, and a compound not named here should be treated as a question for a national anti-doping organization rather than as a settled absence. The peer-reviewed literature will not settle it either: the 2026 primer that names this combination among the peptides it evaluated concludes that the indications, frequency and duration of treatment for these compounds remain unknown.^[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.