---
slug: selank
title: Selank: one 62-patient trial against a benzodiazepine, and 40 people counted
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/selank
---

Selank is a seven-amino-acid peptide developed in Moscow and approved in Russia in 2009 for generalised anxiety disorder. There is one controlled trial in people that carries almost the whole case: 62 patients, 30 given Selank and 32 given a benzodiazepine, published in 2008. It found the anxiety relief comparable and, unlike the benzodiazepine, no sedation, no muscle slackening, no tolerance and no withdrawal. Two smaller Russian studies followed, one of them showing the calm outlasting the last dose by a week. Nothing of that size or better has been run in the West, and the animal work points to something the sales pages leave out: in mice, the effect showed up only in the strain that was anxious to begin with.

The site you are reading this on is funded by a business that sells this peptide. That is a commercial interest, and it is why the trial sizes below are given as numbers rather than as the phrase "clinically studied".

## Two peptides fused: an immune signal with a protection tail

The sequence is Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gly-Pro. The first four letters are tuftsin, a fragment your own body cuts out of an antibody. Tuftsin's day job has nothing to do with anxiety: it tells the cells that swallow bacteria to get on with it. The last three letters — proline, glycine, proline — are a chemical tail that stops enzymes in the blood from chewing the molecule up in seconds.

So Selank is an immune peptide with a stability tail bolted on. That construction explains something that otherwise looks like marketing overreach. When you read that this compound both calms anxiety and changes immune signalling, that is not two claims stacked to sell a product. It is one molecule that came out of an immune fragment, and both halves have been measured.

## The 62-patient trial that is the whole human case

Sixty-two patients with generalised anxiety disorder and neurasthenia — a diagnosis still used in Russian practice for exhaustion with anxiety — were split into two groups. Thirty received Selank. Thirty-two received medazepam, a benzodiazepine. The published result: Selank produced clear anxiety relief and a mild improvement in thinking, and did it without the side effects that come as standard with that drug class. The paper names them: sedation, muscle relaxation, tolerance building, and a withdrawal syndrome on stopping.

That comparison is the reason anyone outside Russia has heard of this compound, so it is worth being precise about what it is and is not. Thirty patients in the Selank arm is small. The comparison was against an active drug rather than a placebo, which tests whether it matches medazepam and not whether it beats nothing. And it was published in a Russian journal in 2008 and has never been repeated by an independent group in another country.

Two further Russian studies fill in around it. One compared Selank against phenazepam, another benzodiazepine, in anxiety disorders: it again found clear anxiety relief with a mild thinking benefit, and reported something the benzodiazepine comparison does not produce — the calm lasted a week after the last dose. A conference report on treatment response found 40 per cent of patients were fast responders, with the whole set of symptoms dropping inside the first one to three days.

You will also see two figures quoted on clinic pages that the primary papers here do not support: a "70 per cent reduction in anxiety scores", and a claim that Selank completed Phase III trials. Neither traces to a paper in the set of sources attached to this page. Treat both as marketing until someone produces the document.

## The follow-up nobody quotes: adding it to a tranquilliser cut the tranquilliser's side effects

The most practically interesting human study is the one that gets left out of every summary. Patients on phenazepam had Selank added. The tranquilliser's benefit arrived sooner, and the list of problems it causes got smaller — the paper names attention and memory trouble, weakness, sedation, sleeping too long, sexual problems, emotional flatness and dizziness on standing — both during the course and after the tranquilliser was stopped.

If that result holds up, the useful role is not as a replacement for an anxiety drug but as something given alongside one, particularly through the part where the drug is being withdrawn. That is also the use the self-reported record circles back to again and again, which is unusual: the people buying it online and the Russian clinical literature have independently landed in the same place.

## It works alongside GABA instead of docking where the sedatives dock

GABA is the brain's main calming signal. Benzodiazepines work by grabbing a specific spot on the GABA-A receptor and making the receptor respond harder to the GABA already there. That mechanism is also why they sedate, why tolerance builds, and why stopping them is dangerous.

Selank does not do that. When rats were given Selank, 45 genes involved in nerve signalling changed how much they were switched on at one hour, and 22 were still changed at three hours. The pattern the authors found looked like an indirect change to the GABA system rather than a direct grab at the receptor — the peptide alters the machinery around the signal instead of jamming the switch.

That distinction is the whole explanation for the reported side-effect profile. A drug that does not lock onto the sedative site should not sedate, should not build tolerance in the classic way, and should not produce a withdrawal syndrome. The 2008 trial reported exactly that. It is the rare case where the mechanism and the clinical observation agree without anyone having to stretch.

A related human study looked at whole-brain connections at rest in 52 healthy participants given Selank or Semax and mapped where each changed the pattern. That study measures brain signalling, not how anybody felt.

## The mouse result that predicts who it will do nothing for

One study compared Selank given into the nose against Selank injected into the belly in two strains of mouse: BALB/c, which are naturally anxious and explore less, and C57BL/6, which are not. Both routes worked — and only in BALB/c.

Read that again, because it is the single most useful line in the animal literature for anyone deciding whether to bother. The anxiety effect appeared only in animals that were anxious to start with. In the calm strain, either route did nothing.

That finding predicts the shape of the self-reported record below with uncomfortable accuracy. People who describe crippling social anxiety or panic report dramatic responses. People who describe themselves as already fairly calm and taking it for focus report nothing at all. The mouse data says that is not two groups disagreeing about a drug; it is the same drug doing what it does, which is to bring a raised anxiety level down rather than to push a normal one lower.

## Withdrawal is where the animal numbers are strongest

The most specific numbers in the whole Selank literature come from withdrawal models, not anxiety models.

In morphine-dependent rats, a single injection at 0.3 milligrams per kilogram cut the total withdrawal score by 39.6 per cent, with a p-value under 0.0001. It reduced convulsive reactions, drooping eyelids and posture problems, and it raised the touch-sensitivity threshold nine-fold — meaning the animals stopped reacting to light contact that had become painful.

In rats withdrawing from alcohol, the same single 0.3 milligram-per-kilogram dose removed the anxiety that withdrawal produced.

In rats given alcohol long-term, 0.3 milligrams per kilogram daily for seven days protected against the memory damage, and the mechanism traced through BDNF — the growth factor nerve cells use to build and repair connections — staying up in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. The same dose improved thinking in nine-month-old rats that had never been given alcohol.

Under chronic mild stress, Selank on its own reduced raised anxiety more effectively than diazepam did, and the two together were tested in the same experiment.

That heightened touch sensitivity in the morphine study is the closest thing in this literature to a pain finding, and it is worth being blunt about how far it reaches: it is a withdrawal-driven sensitivity measured in rats, and no human study of Selank has measured pain of any kind.

## The immune side, which is the half nobody sells

Because the molecule starts as an immune fragment, the immune measurements are not a side note.

Under social stress in animals, Selank brought four inflammatory messengers down to near-normal levels: IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α and TGF-β1. Those are the same signals that run high in chronic inflammation anywhere in the body.

In people, one study measured these signals in patients with anxiety combined with exhaustion, and the authors concluded the peptide changed the signalling pattern enough to be worth studying as an immune-acting drug in that group.

This is a small evidence base and it is pointing somewhere real. It is also the part of the story that gets dropped when the compound is sold as a calm-focus spray, which is a shame, because the inflammation numbers are more specific than most of the anxiety numbers.

## Where it flatly failed

In a rat model of Parkinson's disease made by destroying dopamine neurons with 6-OHDA, neither Selank nor Semax changed movement activity, and neither changed the animals' passive defensive behaviour. That is a clean negative in a model where BDNF-raising compounds are often assumed to help.

One evidence-rating service scores Selank 34 out of 100 and grades it D+, citing limited validation outside Russia. A clinical question-and-answer service concludes it should not be used off-label for mild-to-moderate anxiety in adults because it is not FDA-approved and the data are insufficient. Both of those are judgements rather than measurements, and both are fair readings of a file whose best trial has 30 people in the treatment arm.

## Forty people wrote down what happened, and the direction is one-sided

Sixty self-reported sources were collected for this page from Reddit, X, YouTube, Instagram and a bodybuilding forum. Twenty of them are guides, product descriptions, vendor answers, dosing questions or general commentary with no personal outcome, so they are not counted. Forty describe what happened to a specific person.

Of those 40: 27 reported a benefit, 6 reported a benefit that came with a cost, 3 reported nothing at all, and 4 reported harm.

Nobody was blinded and nobody was randomised. People who feel transformed post more than people who feel nothing. A large share of accounts describe taking Selank together with Semax, which makes attributing any single effect to one of them unreliable. With all that said, this is a lopsided record — roughly two in three clear benefit — and the direction is worth reporting, because it is more one-sided than the record for most compounds documented on this site.

### The 27 who said it worked, and what they say it feels like

The descriptions are unusually consistent, and they are not descriptions of sedation.

"It's not like benzos where anxiety just melts — it's more like... I feel like myself. Actually myself. Calm, thoughts coming easily, work just flows." That report, from day three, captures the register of most of the others.

Social anxiety is the strongest cluster. One person, after a single dose: "I finally am free from social anxiety... I easily hold eye contact and can make small talk no problem." Another, on nasal spray for a few days, described it easing social pressure while keeping them focused. A third reported it made their son social while doing nothing for them at the same dose from the same vial.

The subtle version matters as much as the dramatic one. "It doesn't feel like anything. But then I compare my behaviours from a week of taking it compared to before, and I'm a lot less" — the sentence continues into the details of what they stopped doing. Someone measuring stress with a wearable ring reported it reading calm after dosing three hours before bed.

Withdrawal comes up repeatedly and unprompted, matching the Russian clinical work. One person coming off benzodiazepines: "Selank took away all the anxiety, my memory got better. I was able to taper faster." Another, on 1,000 micrograms a day under the skin, reported it helped long-running insomnia and body pains from pregabalin withdrawal. One person reported it settling both IBS symptoms and generalised anxiety by day five, which is the only report here touching the gut.

Sleep shows up as a second-order effect rather than a sedative one: "it calms all the mental noise and allows me to rest better without my mind racing when I go to bed." One person rated their deep sleep "off the charts" at 8 out of 10 after initially noticing nothing.

The strongest single account is a person with long-standing numbness who took 250 micrograms into the nose and described feeling better within five minutes and crying with relief an hour later. One account is that stark and it is one account.

### The 6 who got a result with a cost attached

Fading and tolerance is the main cost. One person on 600 micrograms into the nose daily described exactly the effect they wanted — easier conversation, relaxed but not tired — and then: it does not last long enough, and they felt tolerance building. Another, injecting both Selank and Semax daily, watched the effect erode until 2 milligrams of each did nothing, took a break, and reported it hit like the first time on restarting.

One report is a benefit the person could not keep: "Selank is amazing for me but I cannot tolerate it." One is a benefit shadowed by a specific warning: solid effects, increased focus, and advice to stop immediately at any sign of hair loss. One person noticed nothing except better sleep, then found their REM sleep dropped from 25 per cent to 13 per cent on the days they skipped it, and stopped over that. One first dose of 100 micrograms felt stimulating rather than calming — "it almost felt like I had a hit of coke. I was tweaking a bit."

### The 3 who felt nothing — and the pattern they share with the mouse data

Three accounts report no effect. One used a nasal spray four or five times in a week and asked whether they had bought a placebo. One found four weeks of nasal use not worth cycling again. One got nothing at the same dose that worked for their son.

Every one of those three was chasing focus, calm on demand, or a general upgrade rather than treating a diagnosed anxiety problem. That is the BALB/c and C57BL/6 result showing up in people: the compound moves a raised anxiety level and appears to do very little to a normal one.

### The 4 who got worse, including two who got the opposite of the advertised effect

Two reports are the reverse of the intended effect. One person described a paradoxical reaction — sleep collapsing to 4 or 5 a.m., only a few hours of it, and anxiety getting worse at the same time. One person taking it for PTSD reported extreme paranoia and anxiety, and noted in the same post that their brother used it with great benefit.

Two are mood and sedation. One reported a mood drop from day two that deepened into depression over days, with withdrawal from other people. One, stacking it with Semax and another compound, reported sedation, thinking problems and depressive symptoms — the exact three effects the 2008 trial reported as absent.

Four harm reports out of 40 is not a rate; it is four accounts. But their content is specific and it contradicts the cleanest part of the trial data, so it belongs at the same size as the good news. A person with PTSD or a trauma history has a documented reason here to start at the bottom of the dose range.

## Doses people use, nose against needle, and the sleep timing

The Russian studies used a nasal solution; the animal work used 0.3 milligrams per kilogram into the belly, which does not convert cleanly to a human dose.

What people report using: 100 to 600 micrograms into the nose per dose, or 250 micrograms to 1 milligram a day under the skin. One person runs 500 micrograms three days a week rather than daily. Several dose in the evening deliberately, one to two hours before bed, on the grounds that the effect is calm rather than stimulation. One person's report of a stimulant-like reaction at 100 micrograms is the argument for starting low regardless of what the rest of the record says.

The duration reports cluster short: about three hours of clear effect from a dose, on top of a background change that several people say only becomes visible after a week when they look back at their own behaviour.

## Amidate, Adalank and the modified versions being sold as upgrades

Several products in circulation are not Selank. N-acetyl Selank amidate has chemical caps on both ends to slow breakdown. Adalank is described by its sellers as a modified Selank with two changes intended to make it more stable, cross into the brain faster and last longer.

None of the human trials above were run on either of them. Every trial number on this page belongs to plain Selank given into the nose. A modified molecule with a longer life in the body is a different compound with a different dose response, and treating the trial evidence as transferable is the most common error in the material sold around these.

## What the FDA has and has not done here

Selank is not approved by the FDA for anything. It is approved in Russia for generalised anxiety disorder, which has no bearing on its US status.

The compounding position is where the misinformation sits. The FDA's bulk drug substances document for 503A compounding has two tables, and Selank sits on the one that records a withdrawn nomination — meaning nobody is currently pursuing the application. It is not on the approved bulks list. Blog posts announcing that these peptides are "now legal for compounding" in 2026 are describing a status the document does not give. Withdrawn is not approved, and off the flagged list is not on the permitted list.

## What is settled, what is Russian-only, and what nobody has measured

Settled: the molecule is a tuftsin fragment with a stability tail; it changes how genes involved in nerve signalling are switched on, in a pattern consistent with acting around the GABA system rather than at the sedative site; it brings four inflammatory messengers down under stress in animals; it cut a morphine withdrawal score by 39.6 per cent in rats; and it did nothing in a rat Parkinson's model.

Russian-only, and never independently repeated: the entire human anxiety case, including the 62-patient comparison against a benzodiazepine, the week-long carry-over after the last dose, and the finding that adding it to a tranquilliser reduces that tranquilliser's side effects.

Never measured in anyone: pain of any kind, long-term use beyond the study windows, and any dose given under the skin rather than into the nose. The self-reported record runs almost entirely on the route with no trial behind it.

Thirty-two published sources are attached to this page — 20 indexed studies, 4 reviews, 7 clinical or vendor pages, and a conference report — along with 60 self-reported sources, of which the 40 counted above each carry a platform, a quote and a link on the card. Every figure in this page comes from one of them.

