Semax
Cognitive Research
Available sizes: 5 mg, 10 mg
An ACTH fragment with the hormone activity engineered out
Semax is Met-Glu-His-Phe-Pro-Gly-Pro: the 4-7 fragment of adrenocorticotropic hormone, with a proline-glycine-proline extension. The fragment was chosen because ACTH's behavioural and memory effects survive truncation while its steroidogenic activity does not — the same separation strategy that produced KPV from α-MSH.
The Pro-Gly-Pro tail is a stability device. Proline residues resist exopeptidase attack, extending a half-life that would otherwise be measured in a few minutes.
What the research reports
BDNF expression. Increased brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the hippocampus is the most consistently replicated finding.
Cerebral ischaemia models, the setting for most of its Russian clinical use.
Cognitive and attentional measures in animal models and human trials, mostly of modest scale.
Monoaminergic and BDNF/TrkB signalling as proposed downstream mechanisms.
Intranasal delivery, the route it was formulated for and a subject of study in its own right.
Reading the evidence
Semax is a registered medicine in Russia and Ukraine and is not approved elsewhere. Much of its trial literature is Russian-language and not indexed in the databases most reviewers use, so the apparent volume of evidence and its accessibility to independent scrutiny differ considerably. That is worth stating plainly rather than leaving implicit.
Read alongside
Selank is its sibling — same institute, same design logic, anxiolytic rather than nootropic focus. Adamax is a Semax-related analogue, and Cerebrolysin covers the neurotrophic question with a mixture rather than a single peptide.
Documentation and verification
Certificates of Analysis are published for tested products and batches. A certificate is a batch-specific record: it reports what was measured, by which method, on a stated date, against a batch identifier. It is evidence about the sample analysed at the time of analysis, and it is silent on attributes it does not list and on what has happened to the material since.
The batch number is the field that connects the document to a physical vial. Where the identifier on a vial does not appear on a certificate, the certificate does not describe that vial, however thorough the analysis behind it was. Batch records can be searched directly, and the guides below explain what each field establishes and what it does not.
- Verify a batchSearch a batch number for the certificate records published against it.
- How to read a certificate of analysisWhat each field reports, and the limits of what a certificate can establish.
- Certificate, specification and safety data sheetThree documents that answer three different questions.
- Storage and handlingWhat defined storage conditions mean, and why cold slows degradation.
- Batch numbers and traceabilityHow an identifier ties material to the analysis describing it.
Supplied for laboratory research use only. Not for human or veterinary use.