Compounds › Verified against primary sources

Semax — the evidence

The dose in the Russian trials is 12 to 72 times the community's

Partially approvedVerified against primary sources

Experimental material. Read before using anything from here.

Nothing on this page is a medical recommendation, prescription or treatment plan. It is an organized translation of protocols circulating in research communities and, where it exists, of what published trials tested. The two are marked differently — and they are not equivalent.

Most of the compounds here have no FDA approval for human use. Several are sold labeled "research use only", which means they have not gone through purity, sterility or dosage controls for human consumption. A community-reported dose is not a validated dose: it is what someone reported having done.

Talk to a licensed health professional before considering any of these compounds. If you already use one and feel anything unexpected, seek care — do not wait for the next routine test.

Specific caution for this compound: None of the four trials was done in healthy people. Semax's clinical base is entirely in disease — stroke, motor neuron, optic nerve — and says nothing about cognition in people who are well, which is the most common use outside Russia.

Summary

Companion to the Semax protocol page, and the largest discrepancy this site has found. The four published clinical trials used 6,000, 12,000 and 18,000 mcg per day; the range that circulates in the community is 250 to 1,000 mcg. They are different contexts — acute stroke in hospital versus everyday cognition — but the consequence is that the range in practice has never been tested in any trial. Zero registrations on ClinicalTrials.gov, and one of the four studies is frankly negative.

The finding that changes how the dose is read

This survey produced the largest discrepancy I found on the whole site, and it is about Semax.

The protocol page gives the doses that circulate in the community: 250 to 1,000 mcg per day. The published Russian clinical trials used 6,000, 12,000 and 18,000 mcg per day — twelve to seventy-two times more.

Neither is wrong: they are different contexts. The Russian dose is hospital-based, for acute ischemic stroke, in a short course. The community dose is for cognition, for an indefinite period. But anyone who reads only the protocol page has no idea that Semax's clinical evidence was built on a completely different regimen from the one that is practiced.

How much evidence exists

PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov, consulted on September 4, 2026.

Evidence base	Query	Result
PubMed	`Semax`	231 papers
PubMed	`Semax AND (Clinical Trial[Publication Type] OR Randomized Controlled Trial[Publication Type])`	4 papers
ClinicalTrials.gov	intervention containing Semax	0 records

The four trials, with the doses they used

According to PubMed, this is what exists clinically on Semax. All in Russian, all in the same pair of journals, and three of them with Miasoedov or Skvortsova among the authors — the group that developed the compound.

Study	N	Context	Dose used	What was found
Gusev et al., 2018 Zh Nevrol Psikhiatr 118(3 Pt 2):61-68	110	Post-ischemic-stroke rehabilitation, early vs. late	6,000 mcg/day, 2 courses of 10 days with a 20-day interval	Raised plasma BDNF and accelerated improvement on the Barthel index, with the effect adding to that of early rehabilitation
Serdiuk et al., 2007 Zh Nevrol Psikhiatr 107(4):29-39	27	Motor neuron disease	12,000 mcg/day intranasal, 2 courses of 10 days	Did not alter the course of denervation or the clinical outcomes. Improved only quality of life, through emotional state and motivation, peaking at day 10
Gusev et al., 1997 Zh Nevrol Psikhiatr 97(6):26-34	30 (versus 80 controls)	Acute hemispheric ischemic stroke	12,000 mcg/day in moderate stroke and 18,000 mcg/day in severe, courses of 5 and 10 days	Accelerated regression of the neurological deficit, above all motor, with follow-up by EEG and evoked potentials
Polunin et al., 2000 Vestn Oftalmol 116(1):15-8	N/A	Optic nerve diseases	not specified in the abstract	Improvement in visual acuity, visual field and color vision, in three groups by route of administration

An honest reading of these four

Zero registered trials. No Semax study has been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. The four papers are publications, not pre-registered protocols.
None is in healthy people. All four are in disease — stroke, motor neuron, optic nerve. Semax's clinical base says nothing about cognition in people who are well, which is the most common use outside Russia.
One of them is frankly negative. In motor neuron disease, Semax did not change denervation or clinical outcomes — it improved only perceived quality of life. That result rarely appears in vendor copy.
The authors are the group that created the compound. Miasoedov and Skvortsova appear in three of the four. The same caveat as for Thymalin applies.
The most recent is from 2018, and the oldest from 1997. There is no active clinical program.

What to do with the dose difference

I am not recommending raising the dose to the Russian level. The high dose was used in a hospital setting, for a few days, in people who had just had a stroke — a situation where the balance between risk and benefit is different.

What I record is simpler and more uncomfortable: the community range has not been tested in any trial. It is not a reduced, prudent version of the clinical dose; it is a number that emerged in practice and never went through a study. Anyone using 300 mcg for focus is outside any published protocol — whether too much or too little, nobody knows.

References

This page did not come from the secondary source. Every number was collected by me from the sources listed below, on September 4, 2026, and the query used is stated above.

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