What it is
The product sold as CJC-1295 without DAC is not CJC-1295. It is a 29 amino acid peptide, the natural GHRH fragment 1 to 29 with four amino acid substitutions, and it is more accurately called modified GRF 1 to 29.
The arithmetic settles it. Real CJC-1295 has 30 residues and a formula of C165H269N47O46 at about 3647 daltons. This has 29 residues and a formula of C152H252N44O42 at about 3368 daltons. The 279 dalton difference is the missing lysine plus its maleimidopropionyl group, which is the Drug Affinity Complex. These are not salt forms, not isomers and not one peptide in different packaging.
The name is a contradiction in terms. CJC-1295 was named in 2005 for one of three candidates selected on the strength of its albumin conjugation. Remove the DAC and the remaining 29-mer is not one of those three candidates. It is the starting material the programme was trying to improve on.
What is known about it
No human study of this molecule exists, by any name, of any design. That is not a gap in the evidence, it is the whole state of the evidence.
The complete indexed literature on CJC-1295 is 33 records. Four are human studies and all four used the DAC version. Three are animal biology, all DAC. Sixteen are anti-doping analytical chemistry. None is a primary study of the no-DAC molecule.
No trial has ever been registered for it under any of its names. A 2026 endocrinology review, the only one in the corpus that treats the two variants as separate entities, states that it remains essentially uncharacterised in the peer-reviewed human literature, that no controlled clinical studies have directly evaluated it in humans, and that claims about pulsatility or body composition derive from extrapolation and non-academic sources. That review assigns it its own lowest evidence tier.
Where the molecule does appear in primary literature is analytical chemistry, where a WADA-accredited laboratory synthesised it and characterised its metabolites so it could be detected. Establishing that a compound exists and can be found in urine is not evidence about what it does.
Its half-life has never been measured
The figure of about 30 minutes circulates everywhere and has no source. There is no pharmacokinetic study of this molecule in any species.
A short duration is the mechanistically correct expectation, and the basis can be stated without inventing a number. Native GRF 1 to 29 is cleaved in plasma with a half-life of 13 minutes. In the same study, substituting alanine at position 15, one of the four substitutions this molecule carries, extended that only to 17 minutes, while a D-amino acid at the penultimate position prevented the main cleavage entirely. So the tetrasubstitution removes the dominant degradation route and adds no albumin anchor. What that adds up to in minutes has never been measured.
The reasoning used to justify choosing it is inverted
The standard argument for the no-DAC product is that the DAC produces an unnatural continuous elevation of growth hormone, whereas the short-acting version preserves physiological pulses.
The only study that has ever measured growth hormone pulsatility under CJC-1295 studied the DAC version, and it is titled for its finding: pulsatile secretion of growth hormone persists during continuous stimulation by CJC-1295. Pulse frequency and magnitude were unaltered.
So the paper used to justify choosing no-DAC is a DAC paper whose result removes the reason to choose no-DAC. No study has ever measured growth hormone pulsatility under the no-DAC compound.
What crosses the gap, and how far
Growth hormone and IGF-1 figures from the DAC version are routinely quoted for this one. A two to ten fold growth hormone rise for at least six days and an IGF-1 rise lasting nine to eleven days came from a single injection of a compound with an eight day half-life. Those numbers are physically impossible for a molecule cleared in minutes.
The conflation is not confined to vendors. Of nine 2026 review articles on peptides in sports and aesthetic medicine, eight treat CJC-1295 as a single compound. The distinction is maintained by doping-control chemists and by one endocrinology review, and by almost nobody else. Meanwhile the CJC-1295 with ipamorelin product that dominates clinical peptide practice is, per that review, typically the non-DAC form. The name most used in clinics attaches to the molecule with no human evidence, while the name credentials belong to the other one.
A traceable error now propagating in a major journal
A 2026 review in the American Journal of Sports Medicine states that CJC-1295 combined with ipamorelin showed significantly improved maximum tetanic tension in murine models with glucocorticoid-induced muscle loss.
The underlying study is a 2001 paper on ipamorelin counteracting glucocorticoid-induced decrease in bone formation. It used ipamorelin alone, in rats rather than mice, with no CJC-1295 in it and no combination arm. A dedicated search for primary studies of the combination returns only reviews and one horse-doping method paper. No primary study of CJC-1295 with ipamorelin exists in any species.
What is in the vial is also uncertain
The identifiers are contaminated. The PubChem record whose deposited sequence is unambiguously the 29-residue no-DAC peptide carries three CAS numbers and a synonym list that includes CJC 1295 with DAC, CJC-1295-no DAC acetate and DAC:GRF acetate simultaneously. A single database record labelled as both molecules at once. Any CAS number printed on a CJC-1295 product is close to meaningless as an identifier, which is why this site gives formula and mass instead. Those differ, and relabelling cannot fake them.
Seized product has been analysed twice with relevant results. In 2009 the Norwegian doping control laboratory examined a preparation seized by police and customs and found a 29 amino acid C-terminally amidated peptide, which it reported as consistent with a peptide marketed as CJC-1295. That is the no-DAC molecule, so product sold as CJC-1295 and analysed by a national laboratory was not CJC-1295, and the paper did not frame it as a substitution. Separately, Danish customs seizures analysed at the University of Copenhagen contained a modified GRF 1 to 29 carrying an extra glycine at the N-terminus, which is a third molecule again, presumably produced to evade targeted screening.
So the supply chain contains at least three distinct peptides that can arrive in a vial labelled CJC-1295.
Regulatory status
Not an approved drug anywhere. It has never been a regulated substance, so it has no FDA substance registration and no unique ingredient identifier. CJC-1295 appears on the FDA Category 2 page among substances nominated but withdrawn, without distinguishing the two forms.
WADA names CJC-1295 in section S2.2.4 among GHRH analogues, prohibited at all times. As with TB-500, the anti-doping language sidesteps the identity problem by naming the class rather than the molecule, so both products are caught regardless of which is in the vial.