Selank is a Russian nasal drop for anxiety. Its three patient trials had 192 people and no placebo group.

What selank is

Selank is a seven-amino-acid peptide, Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gly-Pro, that its Russian label describes as a synthetic analog of tuftsin, a peptide made in the body.[7][6] FDA's compounding files call the salt form selank acetate, also known as TP-7.[8]

In Russia it is registered as Selank 0.15% nasal drops, 1.5 mg of selank per mL, held by the Moscow company Peptogen and sold without a prescription.[6] The label lists adults 18 and older with anxiety states, including panic attacks, neurasthenia, sleep problems and adjustment disorders, plus the prevention and treatment of stress disorders. It is contraindicated in pregnancy, breastfeeding and under 18, in each case because "clinical studies were not conducted." Its listed side effects are allergic reactions and an unpleasant taste if drops reach the throat, both of unknown frequency.[6]

The patient trials

Three studies, 192 patients, no placebo

The first trial, published in 2008, treated 62 patients with generalized anxiety disorder or neurasthenia: 30 with selank and 32 with the benzodiazepine medazepam. Its English abstract reports that the two drugs had similar anti-anxiety effects on Hamilton, Zung and clinical global impression scales, and that selank also had "antiasthenic and psychostimulant effects."[1] PubMed indexes it as a randomized trial, but the abstract does not describe blinding, and pepmg could not obtain the Russian full text. A companion report described cytokine changes in patients given selank for 14 days, without a sample size in its abstract.[4]

The 2014 trial is the one pepmg could check in full. Its authors call it an open naturalistic prospective study: 60 adults aged 18 to 55 with phobic-anxiety, hypochondriac or somatoform disorders were randomized to selank 2.7 mg a day or phenazepam 2 mg a day for 14 days, then followed for a week off treatment.[2] By day 14, anxiety subscale scores had fallen 26.3% on selank and 55% on phenazepam, 5 versus 7 of 30 patients met the study's response criterion (at least a 50% fall in the total score), and clinicians rated 5 versus 14 as markedly improved; the text gives no p-value for these day-14 differences. At day 21, a week after both drugs stopped, 17 on selank and 9 on phenazepam met them (p = 0.037). The most notable complaint on selank was nasal dryness; on phenazepam it was excessive sedation, asthenia, emotional indifference, sexual dysfunction and orthostatic symptoms.[2] The English abstract mentions the lasting effect after stopping but not the weaker result at the end of treatment.[2]

The 2015 trial, also open and naturalistic, randomized 70 patients to phenazepam alone (30) or phenazepam plus selank (40) for 14 days.[3] By day 14, 23% versus 40% met the response criteria, a difference that was not statistically significant (p = 0.14). Twenty patients in the combination group then kept taking selank for a week: 75% of them were responders at day 21, against 30% and 25% of the patients whose treatment had stopped, which compares people still on a drug with people off it. The authors report fewer phenazepam side effects with the combination.[3]

All three trials list N.V. Kost, O.Yu. Sokolov and N.F. Myasoedov among their authors.[1][2][3] A PubMed search for "selank" on October 19, 2026 returned 136 records; many are unrelated matches, most of the rest are animal or cell studies, and pepmg found no other trial in patients among them.[19] The one other human study gave 52 healthy volunteers selank, semax or placebo and measured brain connectivity on MRI, not symptoms.[5]

The trial doses above are reported as published for adults with anxiety disorders in a hospital study. They are not recommendations.

United States

No approval, no trial, no compounding category

pepmg found no FDA approval for selank in Drugs@FDA, and no ClinicalTrials.gov record names it, both searched October 19, 2026.[17][18] Under section 503A, a pharmacy may compound from a bulk substance only if it has a USP or NF monograph, is a component of an FDA-approved drug, or appears on FDA's 503A bulks list.[10] That list, in the federal regulation, has six entries, none of them selank.[11]

While FDA works through nominations, its interim policy sorts substances into three categories. Selank acetate is in none of them in the list updated May 14, 2026.[9] It was once in category 2, the significant-safety-risk group, and is now on FDA's list of nominations withdrawn by the nominators. FDA's entry says compounded selank acetate "may pose risk for immunogenicity for certain routes of administration" and that FDA "lacks important information regarding any safety issues raised by selank acetate administered to humans."[8]

Selank was not on the agenda of FDA's July 2026 compounding advisory meeting, and FDA's semax review set aside a selank article as "out of the scope of this evaluation."[12][13] FDA's interim access policy for certain peptides was still listed as under White House review on October 18, 2026, and its text is not public, so whether it would cover selank is unknown.[14]

FDA's NDC directory, queried October 19, 2026, lists nine bulk-ingredient powders named selank or selank acetate, five of them labeled "for human prescription compounding."[15] FDA says inclusion in the directory "does not indicate that FDA has verified the information provided or that the products are FDA-approved."[16]

The market

A nasal drug, mostly sold by the vial

In pepmg's index generated October 18, 2026, 95 of 104 vendors carried a selank listing, 191 listings in all, the fifth-widest coverage of any compound.[22] Only 21 of those listings name a nasal or spray product. Most are vials, 10 mg being the most common size; 40 are blends, and 28 use a modified name such as N-Acetyl Selank Amidate, which is not the selank described in the trials or the Russian label.[22][6] pepmg makes no claim about what is in any vendor's vial.

Regulators have noticed the same market. A Belgian medicines lab identified selank and semax in two unknown preparations seized in 2017 and 2018 and found such peptides "freely available" online as powder for injection or in nasal sprays.[20] A 2021 review by researchers at the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy and Hartford Hospital called phenibut and selank "poorly studied Russian drugs" sold to U.S. consumers as dietary supplements.[21] FDA's semax review found one U.S. website offering a "50:50 combination of semax and selank" as an injectable and a nasal spray.[13]

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