What it is
Selank is a synthetic heptapeptide, Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gly-Pro, built by extending the endogenous immunomodulator tuftsin (Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg) with the same Pro-Gly-Pro tripeptide used to build Semax from ACTH(4-7). It carries the laboratory designation TP-7 in the older pharmacology literature. Like Semax, it was developed in Russia and is registered there as a prescription nootropic and anxiolytic drug sold as intranasal drops. It has no FDA label, no EMA authorisation and no approval in any jurisdiction outside Russia.
The human trial record: there is not one, in this search
This is the central fact of this entry, and it runs against the assumption a reader might carry from Semax’s own page. A PubMed search combining Selank or TP-7 with human, clinical trial and anxiety terms returned no results. Every study located for this entry that actually administered Selank or TP-7 to a living animal did so in rats, not in people.
Those rat studies are real and specific. A 2022 study found that a single 0.3 mg/kg injection of Selank reduced the total index of naloxone-precipitated morphine withdrawal in rats by 39.6 percent, close to but somewhat below diazepam’s 49.3 percent at 2 mg/kg. A 2019 study found that the same 0.3 mg/kg dose, given over 7 days, prevented ethanol-induced memory and BDNF disturbances in rats chronically exposed to alcohol. Older Russian-language work from the 1990s and 2000s reported anxiolytic effects of TP-7 in rat anxiety-fear models sustained over four weeks, along with effects on gene expression for chemokines and cytokines in mouse spleen.
None of that is a human finding. Selank is sold to and used by people in Russia as a registered drug, and it is plausible that Russian regulatory submissions relied on human data not indexed in the international literature searched here. But on the specific search run for this entry, the published, findable human evidence for Selank’s anxiolytic, cognitive, mood, immune, sleep and anti-inflammatory claims is exactly what a preclinical drug’s evidence base looks like: entirely rodent.
What is not known
Whether any of the anxiolytic, mood, cognitive, immune-modulating, sleep or neuroprotective effects reported in rats and mice reproduce in a human being at any dose, by any route. No human trial was located in this search.
Whether Russian regulatory approval for Selank rests on human data that exists but was not indexed or was not located by the searches run for this entry. That possibility is noted rather than resolved.
Human pharmacokinetics, human safety at any duration, and drug interactions. No such human data was located.