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Selank

Tuftsin analog

Cognitive & MoodInjectableNasal📊 Correlative data

Selank (Tuftsin analog) is a cognitive & mood research compound. Anxiolytic/nootropic peptide modulating GABA and serotonin systems and raising BDNF — calm focus without sedation.

Research & educational use only. The information below summarizes published research and mechanisms. It is not medical advice or a recommendation for human use. The protocol that uses it — dosing, sequence and what to retest — is inside Skool ($10/mo).

Selank quick facts

Reported research dosing200mcg-800mcg
RouteSubq
Cycle length4-8 Weeks
Frequency1-2x Daily Am/Mid Day · 5 On 2 Off or Daily
Half-lifeMinutes to hours (route-dependent)
FormsInjectable, Nasal
Evidence levelRussian human studies + animal
Coach Cam’s take

The anti-anxiety counterpart to Semax. Great stacked with it.

How Selank works

Anxiolytic/nootropic peptide modulating GABA and serotonin systems and raising BDNF — calm focus without sedation.

Proposed benefits

Calm focus, anxiolysis and BDNF support without sedation.

Where to get Selank

Selank is sold in 2 forms. They are not interchangeable — the dose and the route differ, so pick the one this page describes unless you know why you want another.

Selank reconstitution calculator

Research reconstitution calculator

For research reconstitution math — 100 units = 1 mL on a U-100 syringe. Enter the vial size and bacteriostatic water to convert a research amount into syringe units.
U-100 syringe
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Enter the vial size to calculate

Bacteriostatic water is the diluent — sterile water with 0.9% benzyl alcohol, which is what lets a vial be drawn from more than once. It does not come with the vial, and unlike the compound it is bought again every time.

Need bacteriostatic water? Get it at AminoWell USA (my company) → Code CAMERON.

The evidence for Selank

Graded by what exists behind each claim.

Human clinical evidence

📊 Correlative data

🧪 Theoretical / extrapolated

How to read the Soviet clinical series →

How to read these tiers: they say how much human evidence exists, not how well something works — and ✗ flags harm, never a disappointing trial. How the evidence tiers work →

What Selank actually does

Selank is Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gly-Pro, printed in exactly those seven residues in the abstract of the paper that first measured what it does to human serum Kost 2001. Read it as two pieces, because that is how it was built: Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg is tuftsin, the immunomodulatory tetrapeptide, and Pro-Gly-Pro is a synthetic tail that does not occur in the parent at all.

What the Pro-Gly-Pro buys, in minutes. It is a protease-resistance device, not decoration, and the number attached to it is small and specific. In rats, the intact heptapeptide is detectable in plasma for 7 to 10 minutes, its half-life exceeds that of other oligopeptides of similar structure, and the main pharmacologically active metabolite is tuftsin itself, Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg Boiko 1998. Proline resists most aminopeptidases, so the molecule is trimmed from the C-terminal end back to the tetrapeptide rather than shredded. The honest way to read that: the tail buys single-digit minutes of the intact molecule and then hands over a second active compound. Nobody selling this states either half.

The charge, and why it is the opposite of Semax. Lysine, arginine and a free N-terminus, and not one acidic side chain: computed isoelectric point 11.65 and net charge about +1.9 at blood pH, on a 751.9 Da molecule. Semax, the peptide it is most often paired with, is about −0.9 at the same pH. Two compounds sold as a stack sit on opposite sides of neutrality, which is why they do not behave the same on nasal mucus, on an ion-exchange column, or in the same vial.

Mechanism one: allosteric modulation of GABA binding, not the benzodiazepine site. Radioligand work on isolated rat brain plasma membranes reports that Selank affects [3H]GABA binding as a positive allosteric modulator, that its joint action with benzodiazepines is not simply additive, and — the part that matters clinically — that Selank blocked the modulatory activity of diazepam and of olanzapine, with binding sites that appear to differ but may partially overlap Vyunova 2018. That is a genuinely different claim from the one on most pages: not that it avoids the benzodiazepine site, but that it interferes with what a benzodiazepine does there.

Mechanism two: enzyme inhibition, with a structure-activity ladder nobody quotes. Selank inhibits the enzymes that hydrolyze enkephalin in human serum, dose-dependently, with an IC50 near 20 µM in one assay Kost 2001 and 15 µM in another Zozulya 2001, more potent in both than bacitracin or puromycin. The ladder is the interesting part: pentapeptide fragments kept the inhibitory activity; the tri-, tetra- and hexapeptide fragments did not Kost 2001. So the enzyme effect is not simply tuftsin acting through a longer molecule, and it is not a property of length. What is missing is the enzyme's name: these papers measure total serum enkephalin-degrading activity, not a purified aminopeptidase or neprilysin, so no single target protein has ever been named for this compound.

Cell, rodent, human — and where it stops

In cells, and this is where honesty starts. In human IMR-32 neuroblastoma cells, 84 genes of the GABAergic system were read by qPCR after GABA, Selank, olanzapine and their combinations. Selank on its own produced no change in mRNA levels at all. Combined with GABA it almost completely suppressed the changes GABA alone produced; combined with olanzapine it amplified them Filatova 2017. A compound that does nothing alone in a dish and changes what another ligand does is a modulator, and that is exactly what the membrane binding work says it is Vyunova 2018.

In rodents, with the doses stated. Rats, single administration at 300 µg/kg: 45 of 84 neurotransmission genes changed in frontal cortex at 1 hour and 22 at 3 hours, correlating with the pattern GABA itself produced Volkova 2016. Mice, 300 µg/kg/day for 5 days, intranasal against intraperitoneal: anxiolytic and nootropic effects appeared only in BALB/c, the high-anxiety freezing strain, and not in C57BL/6 — and the route changed the receptor. Intraperitoneal dosing raised [3H]SR 95531 binding to GABA receptors in frontal cortex by 38% and left hippocampal NMDA receptors alone; intranasal dosing raised [3H]MK-801 NMDA binding by 23% and left GABA receptors alone Vasil'eva 2016. At 100 µg/kg, Selank was anxiolytic in BALB/c and raised the plasma leu-enkephalin half-life in BALB/c, with no effect on either in C57Bl/6 Sokolov 2002. At 0.3 mg/kg/day for 7 days intraperitoneally in rats given 10% ethanol as their only fluid for 30 weeks, it protected object-recognition memory and prevented the ethanol-induced rise in hippocampal and frontal cortex BDNF Kolik 2019. A single 0.3 mg/kg injection cut the naloxone-precipitated morphine withdrawal index by 39.6% and raised the tactile threshold 9-fold, against 49.3% and 13-fold for diazepam at 2 mg/kg Konstantinopolsky 2022.

In humans, and there is more here than in most of this catalog. 62 patients with generalized anxiety disorder and neurasthenia, 30 on selank against 32 on medazepam, rated on Hamilton, Zung and CGI: comparable anxiolysis plus an antiasthenic effect the benzodiazepine did not have, and serum enkephalin half-life — shortened in these patients at baseline — rose on treatment Zozulia 2008. 60 patients with phobic-anxiety and somatoform disorders against phenazepam, where the anxiolytic effect persisted for one week after the last dose Medvedev 2014. 30 patients on phenazepam alone against 40 on phenazepam plus selank, where the combination reduced the benzodiazepine's attention and memory impairment, sedation, sexual disturbance and withdrawal effects Medvedev 2015. And 52 healthy volunteers scanned with resting-state fMRI before injection and at 5 and 20 minutes after Selank, Semax or placebo, with changes in connectivity between the right amygdala and right temporal cortex Panikratova 2020.

The obstacles, and none of them is ‘more research is needed’.

Selank pharmacokinetics — how much of it actually gets in

What degrades it, and how fast. Serum peptidases. In rats the intact heptapeptide is present in plasma for 7–10 minutes, the principal metabolite is the tuftsin tetrapeptide, and the distribution is into well-vascularized organs, liver > kidneys > heart Boiko 1998. The Pro-Gly-Pro tail is why the number is minutes rather than seconds.

The gap that is the most interesting fact on this page. Plasma residence is minutes. The clinical anxiolytic effect was reported to persist a full week after the last dose Medvedev 2014, and the rodent gene-expression response was still visible at 3 hours from one injection Volkova 2016. A molecule that is gone in ten minutes and whose effect outlasts it by four orders of magnitude is not occupying a receptor for the duration — it is triggering something that then runs on its own. Almost no page selling this compound mentions the mismatch, and it is the single strongest argument that the effect is transcriptional rather than occupancy-based.

The oral barrier. There is no oral form and no published oral bioavailability figure in any species. A 7-residue peptide swallowed meets gastric acid, then pancreatic proteases, then brush-border peptidases; the enterocyte's named peptide carrier, PepT1, handles di- and tripeptides, so a heptapeptide is outside its substrate range, and anything crossing would still face hepatic first-pass extraction. The nasal route exists to avoid all of that.

The injectable comparator, and what it does not fix. Subcutaneous injection removes the gut and the first-pass liver. It does not remove plasma peptidases — the 7–10 minute number above is a plasma number — and, per the route experiment, it does not produce the same receptor changes as the nasal route Vasil'eva 2016. A strongly cationic peptide (pI 11.65) also binds anionic mucin, which is an argument for nasal retention and against assuming that a nasal microgram equals an injected microgram.

What would have to be true, and how you would know it was not

Four predictions. Two of them say nothing will happen, which on this compound is the informative direction.

1. Morning cortisol will not move. Selank is a tuftsin analog, not a corticotropin fragment, and nothing in its published mechanism touches the HPA axis. Draw AM cortisol at baseline and at 4 weeks and expect a flat line. If it moves, the change is coming from something else in the stack or from the sleep the course changed.

2. A CBC, high-sensitivity CRP and fibrinogen will be unchanged, and this is the prediction that argues against the product. The only published work that looked at hemostasis, lipids and blood sugar under Selank is a 2014 Doklady paper whose PubMed record carries a title and no abstract Mjasoedov 2014 — so nobody can tell you what it found, including this page. At 3–11 µg/kg, ten to a hundred times below every rodent dose, the mechanistic expectation is no measurable movement in anything on a standard panel. A course that moves none of these has not failed; it has confirmed that whatever a user feels is not showing up in blood, which is a conclusion worth being able to state.

3. Plasma enkephalin degradation is the one marker the mechanism actually predicts, and you cannot order it. Both human mechanistic papers used the half-life of leu-enkephalin in plasma as their readout and both reported it rising on treatment Zozulya 2001 Zozulia 2008. No commercial laboratory offers that assay. That mismatch — a compound with a real human biomarker that no consumer can measure — is worth naming rather than substituting a marker that has nothing to do with it.

4. The persistence claim is falsifiable at home in a week. The published clinical claim is that the anxiolytic effect lasts about seven days after the final dose Medvedev 2014. Stop, and log anxiety daily for ten days. If the effect disappears within 24 hours, the published pharmacodynamics are not reproducing at this dose, and that is a real finding about the protocol rather than about the person.

What nobody has tested yet

Six experiments that nobody has run. The first two would settle what this molecule actually is.

1. Selank against tuftsin, head to head, at equimolar dose. The main active metabolite of Selank is tuftsin Boiko 1998. So either Selank is a delivery vehicle for a tetrapeptide that has been known since the 1970s, or the heptapeptide does something the tetrapeptide cannot. One experiment — both peptides, the same anxiety model, the same molar dose — answers it, and in nearly thirty years it has not been published.

2. Which of the two mechanisms the anxiolysis needs. The fragment ladder already exists: pentapeptide fragments keep the enzyme-inhibiting activity and the tri-, tetra- and hexapeptides do not Kost 2001. Run the active pentapeptide in an anxiety model. If it is anxiolytic, the enkephalinase mechanism is carrying the effect; if it is not, the GABA modulation is. Nobody has done it.

3. The interaction that two papers contradict each other on. Membrane work reports Selank blocking the modulatory activity of diazepam Vyunova 2018; a clinical trial reports Selank added to phenazepam improving outcomes and easing withdrawal Medvedev 2015. Blocking a benzodiazepine's action and smoothing a benzodiazepine taper are not the same prediction. No study has measured benzodiazepine effect size with and without Selank in the same people.

4. Phenotype stratification in humans. The entire rodent literature says the response belongs to the high-anxiety phenotype Sokolov 2002 Vasil'eva 2016. A trial that stratified on baseline trait anxiety, or even a self-experiment group that recorded a baseline GAD-7 before starting, would be the first human test of the one variable the animal work says matters most.

5. Intranasal against subcutaneous, in people, same dose. In mice the two routes moved different receptor systems Vasil'eva 2016. In humans nobody has compared them on any endpoint, and this site sells both.

6. BDNF, in the direction the paper actually reports. The one controlled rodent measurement found Selank preventing an ethanol-induced increase in BDNF rather than raising it Kolik 2019, and the intranasal rat study is titled as regulation of BDNF expression rather than elevation of it Inozemtseva 2008. Whether Selank raises BDNF in an undamaged brain has not been established, and plasma BDNF is orderable, so a before-and-after series in healthy users would be new information rather than confirmation.

Selank — its own safety story, not its class's

The class block on this page is written for cognitive enhancers in general — cholinergics, dopaminergics, glutamatergics. Selank is none of those and carries three risks of its own.

1. The dependence claim is a mechanistic argument, not a withdrawal study. The reason to expect no dependence is that Selank does not act at the benzodiazepine site. What exists to support it in people is a 62-patient trial against medazepam Zozulia 2008 and a 60-patient trial against phenazepam Medvedev 2014. No discontinuation study has been published, and the compound demonstrably touches opioid-relevant circuitry: a single 0.3 mg/kg dose cut morphine withdrawal signs by 39.6% in dependent rats Konstantinopolsky 2022. That is evidence it acts there, not evidence it is inert there.

2. The interaction nobody warns about is with the drugs people are most likely to be on. In isolated brain membranes Selank blocked the modulatory activity of both diazepam and olanzapine on GABA binding Vyunova 2018; in cells it amplified olanzapine's effect on gene expression Filatova 2017. Anyone taking a benzodiazepine or an antipsychotic is standing exactly where the two published statements disagree, and no interaction study exists in a person.

3. The developmental datum, stated with both halves. In mouse embryonic stem cells, Selank at 100 µM reduced the proportion of cells differentiating into GABA-positive neurons by 61% — alongside thyroliberin at 58% and NGF at 87% — and the authors' own conclusion from the same experiments was that these peptides do not produce a toxic effect during the embryonic and fetal period Kobylyanskii 2017. Both sentences are true. 100 µM in a dish is not a dose in a person. What matters is that this is the only developmental datum that exists: there is no pregnancy data of any kind for this compound, and a shift in GABAergic differentiation is not a reassuring place for the record to stop.

What zero reported adverse events means here. The published human denominator across every trial is under two hundred people, all in one country, over weeks. That base cannot exclude an event with an incidence of one in a hundred, and the honest sentence is that tolerability looks good in small short trials and nothing longer exists.

Sources read for this page

Selank — safety, predicted from mechanism

Predicted from mechanism, not from a human safety trial. How that reasoning works →

What the mechanism predicts

Derived from the molecule, not a trial.

What has actually been reported

How to reduce the risk

Same mechanism as the prediction.

What it does to your bloodwork

A fact about the assay.

Don't run this if

The honest unknown

Not medical advice. If you take prescription medication or have a diagnosed condition, check this with a pharmacist or doctor.

When to take it

Food is not a factor — pick a time you will keep

Nothing you eat touches a subcutaneous injection, so there is no meal to plan around. What does matter is a fixed slot: the commonest reason an injectable protocol underperforms is missed doses, not mistimed ones.

With a short half-life, dose it near the effect you want rather than at a fixed hour.

From half-life and route, not a dosing trial.

Selank — interference & stacking

Predicted from mechanism, not from an interaction study. How mechanism-predicted claims are made →

What Selank moves on your bloodwork

Expected direction, not a measured one.

Everything on this page, in an order

This one is free and stays free. What Skool adds is the rest of the shelf — 278 compounds and 371 supplements with the protocol, the stack order and the bloodwork to run beside it.

Join Skool — $10/mo →

Bloodwork to run alongside Selank

Baseline first, then again at 8–12 weeks.

MarkerWhat it’s watching for
TSH (Thyroid-Stimulating Hormone)Thyroid disease imitates every cognitive complaint there is
Vitamin B12Deficiency causes fog long before it causes anemia
Methylmalonic Acid (MMA)Catches the deficiency a normal B12 hides
FerritinLow iron flattens cognition at levels most labs call fine
Vitamin D (25-Hydroxy)Commonly low, cheap to correct, associated with mood

The Brain Fog & Cognition panel covers these in one order — 12 markers, $233.06 with the discount applied.

Check results you already have → · All 103 markers A–Z

Selank — frequently asked questions

What is Selank?

Selank (Tuftsin analog) is a cognitive & mood research compound. Anxiolytic/nootropic peptide modulating GABA and serotonin systems and raising BDNF — calm focus without sedation.

What dosing does the research reference for Selank?

In the research literature, Selank is referenced in the 200mcg-800mcg range, 1-2x Daily Am/Mid Day · 5 On 2 Off or Daily. It is supplied as a lyophilized powder and reconstituted with bacteriostatic water; the calculator above converts a research amount into syringe units. For research use only — not a recommendation for human use.

What is the half-life of Selank?

Selank has an approximate half-life of Minutes to hours (route-dependent), which is part of what determines how often it's dosed.

What forms does Selank come in?

Selank is available as: Injectable, Nasal.

What's the evidence behind Selank?

Current evidence level: Russian human studies + animal. Selank is offered for research purposes only and is not an approved medicine.

Selank inside a finished plan

One arm of 2 Protocol Blueprints, free to read in full.

The Cognition Blueprint12 weeks · Selank runs alongside the bdnf armThe Mood & Stress Resilience Blueprint12 weeks · Selank runs as the hpa arm

What Selank is used for

Selank appears under 4 goals in the goal router.

🧠 Focus, memory & cognitionBDNF & neurotrophic signaling🌤️ Mood & stress resilienceHPA axis & cortisol regulation❤️‍🔥 Libido & sexual functionStress, sleep and the things that quietly kill desire🔋 Energy & fatigueAdrenal, cortisol rhythm & stress-driven fatigue

Where this goes next

The full protocol$10/mo

Selank is the bdnf arm of this plan. The page above is the free breakdown of one compound; the plan it belongs to — the dosing, the order to correct things in, the week-by-week schedule and what to retest — is a lesson inside Skool.

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