Selank

A synthetic peptide of seven amino acids (Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gly-Pro), developed in Russia. Its first four building blocks are tuftsin, a short natural fragment that occurs in the heavy chain of human immunoglobulin G — the antibody protein — and the last three are a Pro-Gly-Pro tail added so the body breaks it down more slowly. That tail is the same one carried by Semax, which shares that origin and is sold alongside it. PubChem (CID 11765600) gives C33H57N11O9 and 751.9 g/mol, and the chemical name ends in a carboxylic acid: the chain is a plain seven-letter sequence of ordinary L-amino acids with no cap on either end, which is why a sequence can honestly be printed here. In Russia it is sold as nasal drops; elsewhere it is sold online as a research chemical.

Sold as

Nasal drops in Russia; sold online as freeze-dried powder for injection and as nasal spray, often premixed with Semax. Published animal studies used the nose and injection into the abdominal cavity, and the one placebo-controlled human study gave it by injection. The amount given to patients in the Russian anxiety studies is not stated in any source available in English.

Legal status in the EU

Not approved as a medicine in the EU or the United States. A 2026 review in Int J Mol Sci reports that Selank is registered in Russia for mild anxiety; the Russian state medicines register sits behind a captcha and could not be opened from here, so no registration number is printed. In the United States it cannot legally be made up by a compounding pharmacy either: FDA lists selank acetate (TP-7) among bulk drug substances that may present significant safety risks, under nominations that were withdrawn, on a page current as of 22 April 2026. FDA has never published an evaluation of Selank — its July 2026 briefing document on Semax names selank three times — twice as a co-ingredient in products sold online, and once to call it "a different peptide … which is out of the scope of this evaluation". Selank is not named anywhere in the WADA 2026 Prohibited List, and whether the catch-all section S0 reaches it turns on whether the Russian registration counts as "current approval by any governmental regulatory health authority", which is S0's own wording and on which WADA has published nothing. A 2025 systematic review of brain-doping substances placed Selank in its "unclear status" table.

Two explanations exist and both come from the group that made the compound. The first is that Selank blocks the enzymes that chop up enkephalins, the body's own short calming and pain-damping molecules, so those last longer; patients with generalised anxiety were shown to break enkephalins down unusually fast, and Selank slowed that breakdown in a test tube with a half-blocking concentration of 15 micromolar. The second is that it acts on the GABA system, the brain's main volume-down signal and the same system benzodiazepine tranquillisers work on, but from a different foothold: in isolated brain-cell membranes it changed how GABA bound, and it blunted the effect of diazepam when the two were added together. Gene-activity changes for the GABA machinery have been shown in rat frontal cortex after a single dose into the nose. In a human nerve-tumour cell line the same group found the opposite: Selank on its own changed none of the genes they measured, and did something only when GABA or olanzapine was added alongside it. None of this has been measured in a living person given Selank.

Part of the bodyWhat happensHow it is knownKind of evidence

Anxiety, in people who already have an anxiety diagnosis

This is what Selank is sold for and the only thing it has been given to patients for. In the one study that reports a head-to-head comparison, people with generalised anxiety disorder or neurasthenia — long-running worry, and long-running exhaustion — were treated for two weeks. The authors report that the calming effect was about the same as the benzodiazepine tranquilliser they compared it with, and that Selank additionally lifted tiredness and had a mild stimulating effect the tranquilliser did not. There was no dummy group, so there is no way to separate the peptide from the effect of being treated and watched for a fortnight.

62 patients: 30 on Selank, 32 on medazepam, a benzodiazepine. Scored on the Hamilton and Zung anxiety scales and the clinical global impression scale. Published in Russian in 2008 by the group at the Mental Health Research Center in Moscow that developed the peptide with the Institute of Molecular Genetics. The English abstract does not say the patients were randomly assigned, does not say anyone was blinded, and gives no scale scores.

One small study

Source [01]Source [02]

The brain's own painkiller signals

Enkephalins are short natural molecules the brain and blood use to damp down pain and distress. Enzymes in the blood chop them up within minutes. The Moscow group's explanation for Selank is that it blocks those enzymes, so the body's own enkephalins last longer. They first measured that people with generalised anxiety broke enkephalins down unusually fast, then showed in a test tube that Selank slows the breakdown. In the 2008 patient study, the enkephalin survival time went up during treatment, mostly in the patients with generalised anxiety, and tracked how anxious they were.

Blood samples from patients with anxiety and phobic disorders, plus a test-tube measurement giving a half-blocking concentration of 15 micromolar. The rise during treatment was measured against each patient's own starting value in the 2008 study, which had no dummy group. Every one of these measurements comes from the same laboratory.

One small study

Source [01]Source [14]

Brain scans in healthy volunteers

This is the only published study of Selank in people that included a dummy. Fifty-two healthy adults lay in a magnetic scanner three times — before a dose, five minutes after, and twenty minutes after — while the machine recorded how strongly different brain regions switched on and off together. The authors report a change in the coupling between the right amygdala, an almond-shaped region involved in fear, and a region of the right temporal lobe. Nobody's anxiety was measured, nobody was asked how they felt, and the volunteers did not have an anxiety disorder to begin with.

52 healthy participants split between Selank, Semax and a dummy. The English abstract does not state how many were in each group, does not state how much was given, describes the dose only as an injection, and does not say whether the participants or the people reading the scans knew which was which. The paper is three pages long and behind a paywall.

One small study

Source [03]

The immune system

The four-letter run Selank is built on, Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg, is a piece of an antibody and is known as tuftsin; on its own it nudges white blood cells. Selank inherits some of that. In patients with anxiety and exhaustion treated for fourteen days, the balance between two families of immune messengers shifted. In mouse spleen, a single injection changed the activity of several inflammation genes within thirty to ninety minutes. What none of this shows is whether any of it makes a person more or less likely to get ill.

Serum measurements in patients with generalised anxiety disorder and neurasthenia given Selank for 14 days, with no untreated comparison group described in the abstract, alongside test-tube work on blood cells. The gene measurements were made in mouse spleen after a single injection.

One small study

Source [18]Source [19]

The brain's calming switch

GABA is the main signal the brain uses to turn activity down; benzodiazepine tranquillisers work by making cells more sensitive to it. The Moscow group reports that Selank does something similar but from a different foothold: in isolated brain-cell membranes it changed how tightly GABA stuck, and it blunted the effect of diazepam and olanzapine when they were added together, which they read as the two drugs binding at overlapping but not identical spots. A single dose into the nose changed the activity of genes for the GABA machinery in the frontal cortex of rats. In a line of human nerve-tumour cells the result went the other way: Selank on its own changed none of the 84 genes the same group measured, and did something only when GABA or olanzapine was added alongside it.

Radioactive-tracer binding on membranes stripped out of rat brains; gene-activity measurements in the frontal cortex of 30 rats, 1 and 3 hours after a single dose into the nose; gene-activity measurements in IMR-32 cells, a human nerve-tumour cell line growing in plastic. No measurement of GABA signalling has ever been made in a person given Selank.

Only seen in animals

Source [15]Source [16]Source [17]

Withdrawal from alcohol and from opioids, in rats

Two studies from the pharmacology institute that co-invented the peptide gave it to rats going through withdrawal. In rats that had drunk alcohol as their only fluid for twenty-four weeks, a single injection removed the anxious behaviour that follows forty-eight hours without it, and stopped them becoming over-sensitive to touch, without changing how much they drank. In rats made dependent on morphine, a single injection cut the overall withdrawal score by about 40 per cent against an untreated withdrawal group; diazepam cut it by about 49 per cent. None of this has been tried in a person.

Outbred rats, single injections into the abdominal cavity at 0.3 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, scored on maze and social-interaction tests and on a standard withdrawal checklist. Both studies came from the V. V. Zakusov Research Institute of Pharmacology in Moscow.

Only seen in animals

Source [20]Source [21]

Blood clotting

In a laboratory clotting test, Selank moved blood towards clotting less readily. Of the three related peptides tested side by side, it was the strongest. This has never been followed up in a living person, it is not mentioned in any of the human anxiety studies, and nobody has checked what it means for someone already taking a blood thinner or heading for surgery. It is here because it is the only measured effect of Selank anywhere that points at a way it could do harm.

Thromboelastography — a bench test that watches a blood sample form a clot — at several concentrations, at Moscow State University. The earlier comparison of the same family of peptides was published in 2006. No clotting measurement has ever been made in a person given Selank.

Only seen in a dish, not in a body

Source [22]Source [23]

Habit-forming potential

Selank is sold on the promise that it calms without the two things people dislike about tranquillisers: the fog, and the dependence. The first half has been looked at, loosely, in the Russian studies. The second half has not been tested at all. A 2021 review in an American clinical pharmacology journal put Selank alongside phenibut as a poorly studied Russian drug that works through the GABA system and is sold to United States consumers as a dietary supplement, and argued that substances acting this way should be assessed for abuse potential before the public can buy them, not after.

No published study of dependence, tolerance or withdrawal after stopping Selank exists, in a person or an animal. The 2021 review is a narrative review of GABA-acting sedatives, not a study of Selank.

Claimed, never tested

Source [12]

No published study has ever compared Selank with a dummy treatment in a person with anxiety. All three human anxiety studies used a benzodiazepine tranquilliser as the comparison instead: 62 patients with generalised anxiety disorder or neurasthenia, 30 on Selank against 32 on medazepam, reported as calming to about the same degree (Zozulya et al., Zh Nevrol Psikhiatr Im S S Korsakova 2008); 60 patients with phobic, anxiety and somatoform disorders against phenazepam (Medvedev et al. 2014); and 70 patients where Selank added to phenazepam reduced that drug's side effects against phenazepam alone (Medvedev et al. 2015). All three were run by the Moscow institutes that developed the peptide and published in Russian in one journal; none of the English abstracts says patients were randomly assigned or that anyone was blinded, and none reports a scale score for either arm. The only placebo-controlled human study, in 52 healthy adults, measured connections between brain regions in a scanner and did not measure anxiety at all (Panikratova et al., Dokl Biol Sci 2020). A ClinicalTrials.gov search on the exact word, on 3 August 2026, returns zero registered studies — the unquoted search returns ten unrelated ones and should not be cited. Belgian government scientists who identified Selank in seized preparations wrote in 2020 that to their knowledge it has completed no clinical trial.

Two weeks is the length of every published course. The 2008 study treated patients for fourteen days; the immune study reported on the same fourteen days; the rat studies ran fourteen days. The 2014 study reports that the calming effect was still there a week after the last dose, which is the only statement about duration anywhere in the human literature, and it comes from an abstract with no supporting figures. At the fast end, the one placebo-controlled study scanned people five and twenty minutes after a dose and found a difference at that point. What happens in between is unmeasured in people. One mouse study compared giving it through the nose with injecting it into the abdominal cavity and found the two routes changed different receptor systems in the brain, which is as close as the published work in this record comes to a reason for the Russian product being nasal drops. No study has measured how much of a dose reaches a human brain, how long it stays, or what happens to anyone who takes it for longer than a fortnight.

What was measuredWhat happenedIn whomHow it is known

Anxiety in generalised anxiety disorder and neurasthenia

The authors report that Selank and medazepam, a benzodiazepine tranquilliser, calmed people to about the same degree, and that Selank also lifted exhaustion and had a mild stimulating effect medazepam did not. There was no dummy group in the study, so neither arm can be measured against doing nothing. The English abstract gives no scale scores for either arm.

62 patients with generalised anxiety disorder or neurasthenia — 30 on Selank, 32 on medazepam — scored on the Hamilton, Zung and clinical global impression scales, Moscow, 2008

One small study

Source [01]

Anxiety in phobic, anxiety and somatoform disorders

The authors describe a pronounced calming effect and a mild memory-and-attention effect on Selank, and report that the calming lasted for a week after the last dose. The comparison was phenazepam, another benzodiazepine, not a dummy. The English abstract reports no figure for either arm — not a scale score, not a percentage, not a responder count — so there is nothing to check the description against.

60 patients with phobic, anxiety and somatoform disorders classified under ICD-10 codes F40.2-9, F41.1-9 and F45.0-1, Moscow, 2014

One small study

Source [02]

Side effects of a benzodiazepine, when Selank was added on top

Against phenazepam alone, the group given phenazepam plus Selank had less trouble with attention and memory, less exhaustion, less sedation, less lengthening of sleep, fewer sexual problems, less emotional flatness and less dizziness on standing — during treatment and after the tranquilliser was stopped. This is the only published design in which both arms received the same benzodiazepine, so the comparison isolates what adding Selank did rather than comparing it with something else. The paper reports no numbers in its English abstract, and the patients were not randomly assigned as far as the abstract says.

70 patients with anxiety-spectrum disorders: 30 on phenazepam alone, 40 on phenazepam plus Selank, scored on the UKU side-effect scale and the SF-36 quality-of-life questionnaire, Moscow, 2015

One small study

Source [13]

Coupling between brain regions in healthy adults

Connections between the right amygdala and a region of the right temporal lobe differed between the Selank, Semax and dummy groups, and between the before-dose and after-dose scans. That is the whole result. No symptom, feeling, test score or behaviour changed hands in this study, because none was measured.

52 healthy adults with no anxiety disorder, scanned before a dose and again 5 and 20 minutes after, split between Selank, Semax and a dummy

One small study

Source [03]

Signs of morphine withdrawal in rats

A single injection cut the total withdrawal score by 39.6 per cent against untreated withdrawn animals, and raised the touch-sensitivity threshold nine-fold. Diazepam, given for comparison, cut the score by 49.3 per cent and raised the threshold thirteen-fold. So Selank did something, and did slightly less of it than the benzodiazepine.

Outbred rats made dependent on morphine, withdrawal triggered with naloxone, single injection into the abdominal cavity at 0.3 milligrams per kilogram of body weight

Only seen in animals

Source [21]

Anxious behaviour in rats given a fortnight's course

Not what the marketing predicts. Fourteen days of daily dosing made every group of unstressed rats behave more anxiously than before, including the ones on salt water, which the authors read as the handling itself being stressful. The rats on Selank alone were the only group whose worsening did not reach statistical significance, and the only group whose movement around the maze did not drop. Under two weeks of unpredictable mild stress, Selank combined with diazepam was the most effective of the four arms.

48 male Wistar rats, six per group, Selank alone or with diazepam or salt water, dosed once daily for 14 days, tested on an elevated plus maze

Only seen in animals

Source [24]

Nerve-cell development, in a dish

Mouse embryonic stem cells turned into GABA-producing nerve cells were counted after treatment. Selank reduced the share of those cells by 61 per cent against untreated cells; a thyroid-releasing hormone reduced it by 58 per cent and a nerve growth factor by 87 per cent. The authors' own conclusion was that none of the peptides tested is toxic to an embryo. That conclusion rests on cells in plastic; no study has given Selank to a pregnant animal and looked at the offspring.

Mouse embryonic stem cells and their derivatives in culture, Selank at 100 micromolar

Only seen in a dish, not in a body

Source [25]

There is no published safety study of Selank in people. The US medicines regulator states that compounded medicines containing selank acetate may pose a risk of an immune reaction by certain routes, because the peptide can clump and because peptide-related impurities may be present, and that the agency lacks important information about any safety issues raised by selank acetate given to humans. The Russian papers describe it as calming without drowsiness or memory problems, but not one of them publishes a side-effect rate. One bench clotting test found Selank pushed blood towards clotting less readily, more strongly than the two related peptides tested beside it; this has never been checked in a person, which matters for anyone on a blood thinner or facing surgery. Nothing is known about pregnancy, children, or interactions with anything except benzodiazepines. Whether it is habit-forming has never been studied, and a 2021 review in J Clin Pharmacol grouped it with phenibut as a poorly studied Russian GABA-acting drug sold to US consumers as a dietary supplement that should have been assessed for abuse potential before the public could buy it. A query of the US regulator's adverse-event database on 3 August 2026 returned no reports at all, which reflects the absence of surveillance rather than a clean record. What is in the products sold online is unknown: the only Selank an official medicines control laboratory has reported examining arrived as part of a seizure.

EffectWhat it feels likeHow often

An immune reaction to the peptide itselfSerious

Peptides can clump together in the vial, and the body can start making antibodies against the clumps. The US medicines regulator raised exactly this for Selank: compounded medicines containing selank acetate may pose a risk of an immune reaction by certain routes, because of the potential for the peptide to aggregate and for peptide-related impurities to be present. The same entry says the agency lacks important information about any safety issues raised by selank acetate given to humans. That entry is one paragraph long and it is everything the regulator has published about this compound.

Never measured. No published study of Selank has tested for it.

Source [04]

What is actually in the vial or the spray bottleSerious

In 2017 and 2018 Belgium's national health institute, which runs one of Europe's official medicines control laboratories, was handed two unidentified suspicious preparations seized by the authorities. Analysis showed they contained Selank and Semax. The scientists noted that these peptides are sold freely online as freeze-dried powder for injection and as nasal sprays, wrote that to their knowledge neither has completed any clinical trial, and built a screening method so control laboratories would be able to recognise them in future. Nothing about the purity, sterility or actual content of what is sold has ever been published.

Never measured for the products people buy.

Source [09]

Bleeding or bruising more easily

In a bench clotting test Selank pushed blood towards clotting less readily, more strongly than the two related peptides tested beside it. That is a test-tube result and it may mean nothing in a body. It is listed here because it is the only published finding anywhere that suggests a specific way Selank could cause harm, and because nobody has followed it up — not in someone on a blood thinner, not before surgery, not in anyone at all.

Never measured in a person. Not one of the human studies reports a clotting test, and no bleeding event has ever been published.

Source [22]

What the published human studies recorded

Across the three Russian anxiety studies the authors describe Selank as calming without sedation and without the memory and attention problems benzodiazepines cause. None of the English abstracts lists a single side effect with a number next to it, and none of them reports how side effects were looked for. This is an absence of published reporting, not evidence of an absence of harm — and the papers reporting it are by the people who developed the compound.

No rate has ever been published. The 2015 study formally scored side effects on a standard scale, and reported only that adding Selank reduced the side effects of the benzodiazepine it was added to.

Source [02]Source [13]

Reports sent to the US medicines regulator

Zero reports is not a clean safety record. Almost nobody files a report about something bought from a website, and Selank is not an approved medicine in the United States, so there is no manufacturer with a legal duty to collect and forward what people tell them. An empty database means nobody is watching.

Zero. A search of the regulator's public side-effect database on 3 August 2026 returned no reports naming Selank.

Source [26]Source [27]

These are the amounts the studies below gave their participants, and they are here as facts about those studies. They are not a recommendation, not a starting point and not a range to pick from. What a person should take, if anything, is a question for a doctor who knows them.

Kasian et al. 2017, in rats, not people — a fortnight's course, anxiety behaviour, alone and with diazepam

300 micrograms per kilogram of body weight, into the nose, 5 microlitres in each nostril, against 5 microlitres of salt water in each nostril; diazepam given by mouth at 1 milligram per kilogram

Once daily for 14 days

Source [24]

Kolik et al. 2014 and Konstantinopolsky et al. 2022, in rats, not people — alcohol withdrawal and morphine withdrawal

0.3 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, a single injection into the abdominal cavity; diazepam at 2 milligrams per kilogram in the morphine study

One dose

Source [20]Source [21]

Vasil'eva et al. 2016, in mice, not people — the study that compared giving it by nose with giving it by injection

300 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day, into the nose in one group and into the abdominal cavity in another

5 days

Source [28]

What people report

• Whether Selank beats a dummy for anxiety — no published study has ever included a dummy arm in a patient with an anxiety disorder.
• Whether the Moscow results hold up anywhere else: every human study of Selank was run by the institutes that invented it, in one city, and published in Russian in one journal.
• How much of a dose reaches a human brain, and how long it stays there — the absorption and clearance work was done in rats and mice with a radioactive label.
• What amount was given to the patients in the Russian anxiety studies: the English abstracts do not state it and the full papers are not open, so this register cannot print a single human dose.
• Whether anything happens beyond fourteen days, which is the length of every published course in a person.
• Whether it is safe — there is no published single-dose toxicity study, no repeated-dose toxicity study, no fertility or pregnancy study, and no long-term cancer study.
• Whether the blood-thinning seen in a bench clotting test happens in a body, and what it would mean for someone on a blood thinner or facing surgery.
• Whether it is habit-forming, whether tolerance develops, and what happens when someone stops — none of the three has been studied in any species.
• Whether it provokes antibodies against itself, which the US regulator raises as a possibility and which nobody has tested.
• Whether it does anything in a person who does not have an anxiety disorder — the only placebo-controlled study used healthy volunteers and measured brain scans rather than how they felt.
• What is actually in the vials and sprays sold online: no published analysis of a bottle bought from a website exists, and the only Selank an official laboratory has reported examining arrived as part of a seizure.
• Whether it interacts with anything except benzodiazepines, which is the one combination anyone has looked at.
• Whether it is prohibited in sport: it is not named on the 2026 doping list, and no anti-doping body has published a ruling on whether the unapproved-substances section catches a medicine registered only in Russia.
• What people who take it actually experience — the forums where Selank is discussed could not be opened from this environment, and no published survey or interview study of users exists.

Does Selank actually work for anxiety?

Nobody has run the study that would answer that. Three Russian studies gave Selank to patients with anxiety diagnoses, and all three compared it with a benzodiazepine tranquilliser rather than with a dummy. In the largest, 62 patients, the authors reported that Selank and medazepam calmed people to about the same degree — but with no dummy group and no published scale scores, there is no way to tell how much of that was the drug. The one study that did use a dummy put 52 healthy volunteers in a brain scanner and measured connections between brain regions, not anxiety.

Source [01]Source [02]Source [03]

Is Selank legal?

It depends entirely on where you are. In Russia it is a registered medicine sold as nasal drops for mild anxiety. In the European Union and the United States it is approved for nothing, so there is no legal way to sell it to the public as a medicine. In the United States it also cannot be made up by a compounding pharmacy: the nomination that would have allowed that was withdrawn, and the regulator lists it among bulk substances that may present significant safety risks. What is sold online is sold as a research chemical or as a supplement, neither of which involves anyone checking what is in the bottle.

Source [04]Source [10]Source [12]

What are the side effects of Selank?

No published study reports a side-effect rate for Selank, which is a different thing from saying it has none. The Russian papers describe it as calming without the drowsiness and memory problems benzodiazepines cause, and one of them found that adding Selank reduced those problems in people taking a benzodiazepine — but none lists a single side effect with a number beside it. The US regulator says it lacks important information about any safety issues Selank raises in humans and flags a possible immune reaction to the peptide. One bench study found it made blood clot less readily, and that has never been checked in a person.

Source [04]Source [13]Source [22]

Selank vs Semax — what is the difference?

They came from the same two Moscow institutes and share the same three-part tail, Pro-Gly-Pro, which is what stops the body breaking them down straight away. The front ends are different molecules with different origins: Selank's is tuftsin, a fragment of an antibody, and it is sold for anxiety; Semax's is a fragment of a stress hormone, and it is sold for stroke recovery and focus. The evidence differs too. In 2026 the US regulator published a full evaluation of Semax and put it to an advisory committee; the same document names Selank once and says it is a different peptide, out of scope. There is no equivalent evaluation of Selank anywhere.

Source [29]Source [30]Source [31]

Is Selank banned in sport?

It is not named on the World Anti-Doping Agency's 2026 Prohibited List — the document was searched and the word does not appear in it. Whether the catch-all section for unapproved substances covers it is genuinely unsettled, because that section applies to substances with no current approval by any government health authority, and Selank has one in Russia. A 2025 systematic review of so-called brain-doping substances placed Selank in its 'unclear status' group. Any competing athlete should ask their own anti-doping body rather than rely on a web page, including this one.

Source [05]Source [11]

Are there any Selank trials running now?

None are registered. A search of the United States clinical trials register with the word in quotation marks, so it matches the word and nothing near it, returns no studies at all — not completed, not recruiting, not planned. Searching the same register without quotation marks returns ten studies, none of which have anything to do with Selank; that is the register's word-matching, not evidence of trials. Belgian government scientists who identified Selank in seized preparations in 2020 wrote that, to their knowledge, it has not completed any clinical trial.

Source [08]Source [09]

Can you buy Selank?

It is on sale online as freeze-dried powder and as nasal spray, usually labelled for research use, and often sold together with Semax as a pair or premixed. Nobody checks those products: there is no approval behind them in the European Union or the United States, and no analysis of what a bottle bought from a website contains has ever been published. The only Selank an official medicines control laboratory has reported examining arrived as part of a seizure. In Russia the same peptide is a registered medicine and comes from a pharmacy.

Source [09]Source [29]

Each letter represents one amino acid.

1. [01]Zozulya AA et al. Efficacy and possible mechanisms of action of a new peptide anxiolytic selank in the therapy of generalized anxiety disorders and neurasthenia. Zh Nevrol Psikhiatr Im S S Korsakova 2008;108(4):38-48 (in Russian; 62 patients, 30 on selank against 32 on medazepam) (2008)
2. [02]Medvedev VE et al. A comparison of the anxiolytic effect and tolerability of selank and phenazepam in the treatment of anxiety disorders. Zh Nevrol Psikhiatr Im S S Korsakova 2014;114(7):17-22 (in Russian; 60 patients, no placebo arm) (2014)
3. [03]Panikratova YR et al. Functional Connectomic Approach to Studying Selank and Semax Effects. Dokl Biol Sci 2020;490(1):9-11 (52 healthy adults, Selank against Semax against placebo, resting-state fMRI; no anxiety measure) (2020)
4. [04]FDA: Certain Bulk Drug Substances for Use in Compounding that May Present Significant Safety Risks — entry for Selank acetate (TP-7), listed under substances nominated but withdrawn; page current as of 22 April 2026 (2026)
5. [05]WADA: World Anti-Doping Code International Standard – Prohibited List 2026 (in force 1 January 2026). Searched in full: selank, semax and tuftsin do not appear; section S0 covers substances with no current approval by any governmental regulatory health authority (2026)
6. [06]PubChem CID 11765600 (Selank, TP-7, CAS 129954-34-3) — C33H57N11O9, 751.9 g/mol, chemical name ending in pyrrolidine-2-carboxylic acid, confirming a free C-terminal acid and no amide cap
7. [07]UniProt P01857 (IGHG1_HUMAN) – FASTA sequence of the human immunoglobulin gamma-1 heavy constant region, containing the Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg run that Selank is built on
8. [08]ClinicalTrials.gov API, exact-phrase query EXPANSION[None]"selank" — 0 studies (queried 3 August 2026; the unquoted query returns 10 unrelated word matches) (2026)
9. [09]Vanhee C, Francotte A, Janvier S, Deconinck E (Sciensano, Belgium). The occurrence of putative cognitive enhancing research peptides in seized pharmaceutical preparations. Drug Test Anal 2020;12(3):371-381 (Selank and Semax identified in seized preparations; states neither has completed any clinical trial) (2020)
10. [10]Renke G, Chinellato L. Therapeutic Peptides in Aesthetic, Metabolic and Endocrine Conditions. Int J Mol Sci 2026;27(9) (states Selank is approved in Russia for mild anxiety and nowhere else; note that its human-efficacy and human-safety sentences both cite a rat study, Kasian et al. 2017) (2026)
11. [11]Pokrywka A et al. "Brain doping" substances: prohibited or not in sports? Biol Sport 2025;42(2):189-202, Table 6 — Selank classified as unclear status, with no analogous prohibited substance named (2025)
12. [12]Doyno CR, White CM. Sedative-Hypnotic Agents That Impact Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid Receptors: Focus on Flunitrazepam, Gamma-Hydroxybutyric Acid, Phenibut, and Selank. J Clin Pharmacol 2021;61 Suppl 2:S114-S128 (2021)
13. [13]Medvedev VE et al. Selank added to phenazepam in anxiety disorders — 40 patients on selank plus phenazepam against 30 on phenazepam alone, Zh Nevrol Psikhiatr Im S S Korsakova 2015;115(6):33-40 (in Russian) (2015)
14. [14]Zozulya, Kost, Sokolov, Gabaeva, Grivennikov et al., the inhibitory effect of Selank on enkephalin-degrading enzymes as a possible mechanism of its anxiolytic activity (Bull Exp Biol Med) (2001)
15. [15]Vyunova, Andreeva, Shevchenko and Myasoedov, peptide-based anxiolytics — the molecular aspects of heptapeptide Selank biological activity (Protein Pept Lett 25(10):914-923) (2018)
16. [16]Volkova, Shadrina, Kolomin, Andreeva, Limborska, Myasoedov and Slominsky, Selank administration affects the expression of some genes involved in GABAergic neurotransmission (Front Pharmacol 7:31) (2016)
17. [17]Filatova, Kasian, Kolomin, Rybalkina, Alieva et al., GABA, Selank and olanzapine affect the expression of genes involved in GABAergic neurotransmission in IMR-32 cells (Front Pharmacol 8:89) (2017)
18. [18]Uchakina, Uchakin, Myasoedov, Andreeva, Shcherbenko et al., immunomodulatory effects of selank in patients with anxiety-asthenic disorders (Zh Nevrol Psikhiatr Im S S Korsakova, in Russian) (2008)
19. [19]Kolomin, Morozova, Volkova, Shadrina, Andreeva et al., the temporary dynamics of inflammation-related genes expression under tuftsin analog Selank action (Mol Immunol 58(1):50-55) — mouse spleen, single injection of 100 micrograms per kilogram (2014)
20. [20]Kolik, Nadorova and Kozlovskaya, efficacy of peptide anxiolytic selank during modeling of withdrawal syndrome in rats with stable alcoholic motivation (Bull Exp Biol Med 157(1):52-55) (2014)
21. [21]Konstantinopolsky, Chernyakova and Kolik, Selank, a peptide analog of tuftsin, attenuates aversive signs of morphine withdrawal in rats (Bull Exp Biol Med 173(6):730-733) (2022)
22. [22]Rogozinskaya and Lyapina, anticoagulant effects of arginine-containing peptides of the glyproline family (His-Phe-Arg-Trp-Pro-Gly-Pro and Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gly-Pro) revealed by thromboelastography (Bull Exp Biol Med 164(2):170-172) (2017)
23. [23]Lyapina et al., comparison of anticoagulant effects of regulatory proline-containing oligopeptides — specificity of glyprolines, semax and selank (Izv Akad Nauk Ser Biol, in Russian) (2006)
24. [24]Kasian, Kolomin, Andreeva, Bondarenko, Myasoedov, Slominsky and Shadrina, peptide Selank enhances the effect of diazepam in reducing anxiety in unpredictable chronic mild stress conditions in rats (Behav Neurol 2017:5091027) (2017)
25. [25]Kobylyanskii, Zolotarev, Andreeva, Grivennikov and Myasoedov, studying the toxic effects of some biologically active peptides on the model of mouse embryonic stem cells (Bull Exp Biol Med 163(6):731-736) (2017)
26. [26]openFDA drug adverse event query for selank — no matches found (queried 3 August 2026) (2026)
27. [27]FDA Adverse Event Monitoring System public dashboard — what the database is and what its limits are
28. [28]Vasil'eva, Kondrakhin, Salimov and Kovalev, comparison of pharmacological effects of heptapeptide selank after intranasal and intraperitoneal administration to BALB/c and C57BL/6 mice (Eksp Klin Farmakol, in Russian) (2016)
29. [29]FDA briefing document, Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee, Semax-related bulk drug substances — states that a submitted paper concerns selank, 'a different peptide … which is out of the scope of this evaluation' (2026)
30. [30]FDA, July 23-24 2026 meeting of the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee — the agenda was BPC-157, KPV, TB-500 and MOTs-C on 23 July and emideltide, Semax and epitalon on 24 July; Selank is not among them (2026)
31. [31]Deigin, Poluektova, Beniashvili, Kozin and Poluektov, development of peptide biopharmaceuticals in Russia (Pharmaceutics 14(4):716) — lists both peptides among Russian-developed peptide drugs, Selank as an anxiolytic, with its full chain written out (2022)