5-amino-1MQ is usually sold as a fat-loss compound, and the muscle claim rides along with it: an enzyme blocker that supposedly "wakes up" old muscle stem cells. That claim comes from a real experiment, and the experiment is worth reading closely, because it is not the one the marketing implies. The mice were old and their muscle had been deliberately injured, so what was measured was repair. This page reports what the two muscle studies measured, who ran them and what is missing; it gives no usage guidance, per our editorial standards.
What it is
5-amino-1-methylquinolinium is a small synthetic molecule, molecular weight about 159 in PubChem's record of the free cation (CID 950107). It has no amino-acid chain and is not a peptide. It blocks nicotinamide N-methyltransferase (NNMT), an enzyme that tags nicotinamide with a methyl group so it is excreted, instead of being recycled into NAD+. NNMT rises with age in skeletal muscle, which is the reason a muscle group became interested in blocking it.
The basic "what is it" entry, with structure and names, is Peptide Lexicon's 5-amino-1MQ page. Its reported side effects and the market's dose figures are on Peptifact's 5-amino-1MQ side-effects page and dosage page. This page is about one question: what has been shown for muscle.
Study one: old mice, injured legs
The founding muscle paper is from the University of Texas Medical Branch group that developed the compound (Neelakantan 2019, PMID 30753815; full text PMC6469996, methods read 2026-10-02).
| Detail | What the paper reports |
|---|---|
| Animals | Male C57Bl/6 mice, 24 months old (elderly for a mouse), from the National Institute on Aging; 48 in total |
| Injury | Barium chloride injected into the tibialis anterior (shin muscle) of one leg, a standard way to destroy fibres and study regrowth |
| Groups, short experiment | Saline (n = 13), 5 mg/kg (n = 10), 10 mg/kg (n = 13), injected under the skin twice a day for one week before and one week after injury |
| Groups, long experiment | Saline (n = 6) and 10 mg/kg (n = 6), three weeks after injury |
| Main results | Regenerating fibres had nearly twice the cross-sectional area of controls; peak torque of the injured muscle was about 70% higher |
Those are large effects, and the design is sound for the question it asked: can blocking NNMT help old muscle stem cells repair damage? It did not ask whether healthy muscle grows. No uninjured, untrained, or young animal was given the drug and measured for muscle size. The 70% torque figure belongs to an injured shin in an elderly mouse, compared with an injured shin in an elderly mouse on saline.
The paper's conflict-of-interest statement reads that the authors declare none. The same laboratory's later papers on the compound (the 2018 obesity study, a 2024 metabolic study) share its senior author, and no other group had published a muscle result with it until 2025.
Study two: a different laboratory, a different injury, and no growth
In 2025 a University of Florida exercise-physiology group tested an NNMT inhibitor in mice with peripheral artery disease modelled by tying off the femoral artery (Dong 2025, PMID 41108586; full text PMC12535215). The methods name the supplier and catalogue number of the compound (MedChemExpress HY-131042), which PubChem lists as 1-methylquinolin-1-ium-5-amine iodide: 5-amino-1MQ as its iodide salt (CID 66522933). The paper itself calls it only "NNMTi". This is the one independent muscle study found for this page.
- Design: male BALB/cJ mice, 12 weeks old (young adults), 24 randomised; 10 mg/kg by injection into the abdomen once a day, starting 3 hours before surgery; surgeon and assessors blinded.
- What improved: muscle strength, power and total work in the ischaemic leg.
- What did not change: limb blood flow recovery, capillary density, and, the line that matters for a lifter, muscle mass and myofibre size.
- Funding: NIH grants and an American Heart Association fellowship; no conflicts declared.
So the only replication outside the developing group, in younger animals with a different injury, found more force from the same amount of muscle. That points at how existing fibres work (energy supply, NAD+ status), not at building new tissue. Neither study is evidence of hypertrophy.
The census
PubMed, 2026-10-02. A search for "5-amino-1MQ" or "5-amino-1-methylquinolinium" returns 3 records, none of them a muscle study: a cancer-fibroblast paper, a mouse microbiome study, and a cervical-cancer cell study. The two muscle papers above do not use the trade name in their indexed text, which is why a name search misses them. A broader search for NNMT inhibitors and muscle returns 11 records. Human trials among all of these: 0.
ClinicalTrials.gov, 2026-10-02. "5-amino-1MQ" returns 0 studies, and an intervention search for NNMT returns 0. A control search for MOTS-c on the same day returned 8, so the registry search was working.
Oral route. Every muscle result used injection. The developers have published two oral bioavailability figures, and they do not agree: 38.4% in rats in the 2021 study that validated their blood assay (Awosemo 2021, PMID 34304009), and 3.5% in mice in their 2024 metabolic paper, where 30 mg/kg by mouth gave a total exposure of 224 ng·h/mL and the authors blamed poor gut absorption and first-pass breakdown (Babula 2024, PMID 39161060; full text PMC11622326). Species differ, so both can be true, but neither is a human figure, and no paper explains the tenfold gap. Peptifact's side-effects page reports the mouse figure. Either way, a capsule taken by mouth has no muscle data behind it.
Status in sport
WADA's 2026 Prohibited List, read on 2026-10-02, names neither 5-amino-1MQ nor NNMT inhibitors. Section S4.4.1 names only AMPK activators (AICAR, MOTS-c, BAM15), PPARδ agonists and Rev-erbα agonists. The relevant text is S0, Non-Approved Substances, which prohibits at all times "any pharmacological substance which is not addressed by any of the subsequent sections of the List and with no current approval by any governmental regulatory health authority for human therapeutic use." No health authority has approved 5-amino-1MQ. Whether a sanctioning body would charge it under S0 is that body's call; the wording describes it. The section-by-section register for the other compounds is on WADA status by compound.
No anti-doping detection paper for 5-amino-1MQ was found in PubMed on 2026-10-02, unlike SLU-PP-332, the other unapproved "exercise mimetic" small molecule, for which two accredited laboratories published methods in 2026.
What the mouse amounts would mean at human scale
The muscle studies used 10 mg/kg (twice a day in the aged-mouse study, once a day in the ischaemia study). The body-surface-area convention used to set first-in-human safety starting doses divides a mouse dose by about 12.3 (Nair and Jacob 2016, PMID 27057123). 10 mg/kg becomes about 0.81 mg/kg, roughly 65 mg per injection for an 80 kg adult. That is arithmetic about scale, for an injected compound, and says nothing about an effective or safe amount in people, which nobody has studied.
How it sits next to the other compounds on this site
The pattern is the one recorded for SLU-PP-332 and MOTS-c: a mechanism with a plausible link to ageing or energy metabolism, a striking result in a narrow mouse model, then sale online with no human trial. 5-amino-1MQ's fat-loss side, including its 0 trial registrations, is counted with the other compounds on peptides for fat loss. For the compounds that do have human muscle data, and how little that is, see peptides for muscle growth.
The honest summary
- A small synthetic NNMT inhibitor, not a peptide.
- The muscle claim = elderly male mice with a chemically injured shin, injected twice a day; the three-week arm had six mice per group.
- The one independent study (young mice, blocked leg artery): strength up, muscle mass and fibre size unchanged.
- 0 human trials, 0 registrations; the developers' two oral bioavailability figures are 38.4% (rats) and 3.5% (mice), and no muscle study used the oral route.
- Not named on WADA's 2026 List; S0's wording on unapproved substances describes it.
Limits of this page
Search counts depend on query wording and were taken on one date; the two muscle papers are not found by the compound's trade name, and others may exist under a code name. The Florida study's compound is identified from its supplier's catalogue number through PubChem, not from a name in the paper. Effect sizes are the papers' own summary statements, not re-analysed raw data. A sanctioning body's reading of S0 is not reported here as a legal opinion.
Sources and dates
- Neelakantan H, Brightwell CR, Graber TG, et al. Small molecule nicotinamide N-methyltransferase inhibitor activates senescent muscle stem cells and improves regenerative capacity of aged skeletal muscle. Biochem Pharmacol 2019;163:481–92 — PMID 30753815, full text PMC6469996 read 2026-10-02 (methods, group sizes, conflict statement)
- Dong G, Choi J, Li Y, et al. Nicotinamide N-methyltransferase inhibition improves limb function in experimental peripheral artery disease. Physiol Rep 2025;13:e70615 — PMID 41108586, full text PMC12535215 read 2026-10-02 (compound source, dosing, funding)
- Neelakantan H, Vance V, Wetzel MD, et al. Selective and membrane-permeable small molecule inhibitors of nicotinamide N-methyltransferase reverse high fat diet-induced obesity in mice. Biochem Pharmacol 2018;147:141–52 — PMID 29155147
- Awosemo O, Neelakantan H, Watowich S, et al. Development & validation of LC-MS/MS assay for 5-amino-1-methyl quinolinium in rat plasma: application to pharmacokinetic and oral bioavailability studies. J Pharm Biomed Anal 2021;204:114255 — PMID 34304009
- Babula JJ, Bui D, Stevenson HL, et al. Nicotinamide N-methyltransferase inhibition mitigates obesity-related metabolic dysfunction. Diabetes Obes Metab 2024;26:5272–82 — PMID 39161060, full text PMC11622326 read 2026-10-02 (pharmacokinetics section)
- Nair AB, Jacob S. A simple practice guide for dose conversion between animals and human. J Basic Clin Pharm 2016;7:27–31 — PMID 27057123
- PubChem, CID 950107 (5-amino-1-methylquinolinium) and CID 66522933 (synonym HY-131042, the iodide salt), read 2026-10-02.
- PubMed, searched 2026-10-02:
"5-amino-1MQ" OR "5-amino-1-methylquinolinium"→ 3 records;NNMT inhibitor muscle→ 11 records. - ClinicalTrials.gov API v2, searched 2026-10-02:
5-amino-1MQ→ 0; interventionNNMT→ 0; control"MOTS-c"→ 8. - World Anti-Doping Agency, 2026 Prohibited List, sections S0 and S4.4 read 2026-10-02.