AOD-9604: The hGH Fragment That Went to Clinical Trials
AOD-9604 is one of the few catalogue peptides whose story includes real human clinical trials – and the honest version of that story, including how the trials ended, is more useful to a researcher than the version most sites tell.
The design logic
Human growth hormone is a 191-residue protein with many activities, only one of which – lipolytic signalling – interested the researchers at Monash University who developed AOD-9604 in the 1990s. Their hypothesis: the fat-metabolism activity of hGH lives in its C-terminal tail. AOD-9604 is that tail – fragment 176-191 – with a tyrosine added at the N-terminus for stability. The design goal was a molecule that retained the lipolytic domain while discarding the rest: it does not bind the growth hormone receptor, does not raise IGF-1, and does not carry hGH’s growth-promoting or glucose-disrupting activity.
What the trials found
Metabolic Pharmaceuticals took AOD-9604 through Phase 2 human obesity trials in the mid-2000s. The result is a study in why honest sourcing matters: the compound was well tolerated – the safety record from several hundred participants is genuinely unusual for a research catalogue peptide – but weight-loss efficacy did not meet the endpoints needed to continue, and drug development stopped. A compound with human safety data and failed efficacy endpoints is a very specific thing, and describing it as anything else misrepresents the record.
Where research went next
Post-trial work has continued in model systems: lipid-metabolism studies exploring the fragment’s signalling (reported to act independently of the GH receptor, with beta-3 adrenergic pathways among the proposed mediators), and a separate line of cartilage and osteoarthritis models, sometimes in combination with hyaluronic acid. All of it remains preclinical-stage science on an investigational compound.
At the bench
AOD-9604 is a 16-residue peptide with a disulfide bridge (Cys182-Cys189 in hGH numbering) – avoid reducing conditions, reconstitute gently, and store per the temperature reference. AOD-9604 in the VitaPep catalogue ships lyophilized with per-lot HPLC and MS verification on the COA lookup.
All compounds supplied by VitaPep are for in-vitro laboratory research use only. Nothing on this page is guidance for human or veterinary use of any kind.
EDUCATIONAL CONTENT ON PUBLISHED RESEARCH · ALL VITAPEP PRODUCTS ARE FOR LABORATORY RESEARCH USE ONLY AND NOT FOR HUMAN OR VETERINARY USE.