AOD-9604 in Sport: Named Under WADA S2, Six Sponsor Trials That Never Used a Syringe, and a Test Built for It

AOD-9604 reaches gyms as a fat-loss shortcut with a clean-sounding pitch: the part of growth hormone that burns fat, without the part that grows things. Whether it does that in people is a question its own developer's trials were built to answer and did not publicly answer. For a tested athlete, though, the first questions are simpler: is it on the List, can a test find it, and has anyone been caught. This page answers those, then reads the human record. It gives no usage guidance, per our editorial standards.

What it is, in one paragraph

AOD-9604 is a synthetic 16-amino-acid peptide, YLRIVQCRSVEGSCGF: amino acids 177 to 191 of human growth hormone with an extra tyrosine added at the front. It was developed in Melbourne by Metabolic Pharmaceuticals as an obesity drug and never approved anywhere; Drugs@FDA lists no application. The fat-loss case was built in obese mice, where it raised fat oxidation and slowed weight gain without binding the growth hormone receptor or causing the high blood sugar that full growth hormone did (Heffernan 2001). The "what is it" entry is Peptide Lexicon's AOD-9604 page, reported side effects are on Peptifact's AOD-9604 side-effects page, and this site's fat-loss peptide census counts its trial registrations against the other compounds sold for the same job.

Status: named, at all times, non-Specified

WADA's 2026 Prohibited List, read on 2026-10-03, puts AOD-9604 in section S2.2.3, under the heading "growth hormone (GH), its analogues and fragments", which gives two named fragment examples:

"growth hormone fragments, e.g. AOD-9604 and hGH 176-191"

Two consequences follow, both on WADA status by compound:

• In and out of competition. S2 applies at all times, so an off-season sample counts.
• Non-Specified. The List states that "all prohibited substances in this class are non-Specified Substances". That is the stricter category: BPC-157, by contrast, sits in S0, where everything is Specified. The difference governs how far a sanction can be reduced when an athlete shows how a substance got into their system.

The point worth stressing, because the marketing leans on it: the receptor finding from the mouse work does not move AOD-9604 out of the growth hormone section. WADA names it directly. There is no ambiguity in the text to trade on.

The sanctions record

USADA publishes every sanction it announces in one table. Read on 2026-10-03, it held 1,075 entries. One names AOD-9604:

The table spells the peptide "AOD-9064", a transposition that would hide the case from a search for the correct name. Read it as what it is: one national agency's published record, one case, with a second prohibited substance in the same finding. For scale, the same table names BPC-157 in three sanctions and IGF-1 in four. A single case says more about how rarely anyone looks than about how rarely it is used.

Can a test find it?

Yes, and laboratories built dedicated methods because the standard growth hormone test misses it.

• 2013, Cologne. The German Sport University's doping-control laboratory checked whether AOD-9604 interferes with the WADA hGH isoform immunoassay, the antibody test used for growth hormone. It does not (Orlovius 2013). A fragment that the GH test cannot see needs its own method.
• 2014, Brussels. Belgium's public-health institute characterised AOD-9604 in seized pharmaceutical preparations of unknown content (Vanhee 2014).
• 2015, Salt Lake City. The Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory, after AOD-9604 turned up in confiscated vials in the USA, validated a urine method with a limit of detection of 50 pg/mL and identified six metabolites. One, the fragment CRSVEGSCG, was "significantly more stable" in serum than the parent peptide, which the authors say may extend the window of detection (Cox 2015).
• 2016, Cologne. A direct-urine-injection screen covers AOD-9604 alongside GHRP-1 to -6, ipamorelin, hexarelin and TB-500, at 50 to 500 pg/mL (Thomas 2016). This is the method described on this site's peptides and drug testing page.

What none of these papers gives is a detection window in people: how many days after a given amount a test would still find it. That needs a controlled human administration study, and none was found. Ordinary workplace panels do not test for peptides at all.

The human trials: six of them, and what they did not measure

The human record is one paper, written by authors from the developer and a German contract-research firm: Stier, Vos and Kenley, 2013, in the Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism (doi 10.4021/jem157w). It summarises six randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials in about 900 adults:

Four things about that table matter more than its size.

1. No trial used subcutaneous injection. Two were intravenous single doses, four were capsules or tablets. The product sold to gym-goers is a vial for injection under the skin, the route seized in Belgium and the United States. That route has no published human trial.
2. No trial enrolled athletes or lean adults on an exercise programme. Every participant after the first trial was obese and otherwise healthy, and the first four trials enrolled men only.
3. The efficacy results are missing. METAOD005 and METAOD006 were designed "to assess the efficacy (reduction in body weight)". The 2013 paper reports their safety data. It gives no weight-loss result. A PubMed search returns 23 records for AOD-9604 (2026-10-03), and none reports the outcome of either trial. A 2004 drug-development review records that phase IIa trials were under way by February 2002 (Wilding 2004); after that the efficacy trail goes quiet.
4. What the paper does report is reassuring on its own terms. No change in serum IGF-1, no worsening of glucose tolerance, no antibodies in the patients tested, and no withdrawal or serious adverse event attributed to AOD-9604. Those are the growth-hormone-type harms the trials were looking for, at oral and intravenous doses, in obese adults.

The same paper notes that AOD-9604 had been self-affirmed as "Generally Recognized As Safe" by an expert panel for use in foods, and gives it the cosmetic ingredient name sh-Oligopeptide-74. Neither changes its status in sport.

What the performance claim rests on

The gym claim is fat loss without muscle loss, sometimes with a recovery or joint benefit attached. The fat-loss evidence is obese rodents (Heffernan 2001); the joint claim traces to a rabbit osteoarthritis model in which it was injected into the knee (Kwon 2015). Its developer's own human weight-loss trials have no published result. No trial has measured body fat, muscle, strength or recovery in athletes. For a tested athlete the arithmetic is lopsided: a named, non-Specified, at-all-times substance with a dedicated urine test, against a benefit that was never shown in people.

The honest summary

• Named on WADA's 2026 List in S2.2.3 (growth hormone fragments); prohibited at all times; non-Specified.
• 1 of 1,075 USADA published sanctions names it (2021, 6 months, spelled "AOD-9064").
• Invisible to the hGH immunoassay; detected by dedicated urine methods at 50 pg/mL (2015) and 50–500 pg/mL in a peptide screen (2016). No published detection window.
• Six developer trials, ~900 obese adults: intravenous or oral, never injected under the skin, never in athletes; the two weight-loss trials have no published efficacy result.
• 0 ClinicalTrials.gov registrations; no FDA application.

Limits of this page

The 2013 trial summary is the developer's account of its own programme, published eleven years after the first trials, and its supplementary data were not read. A weight-loss result could exist in a company report or conference abstract outside PubMed; none was found. USADA's table summarises each case in a few words and covers one agency; case decisions were not read. Detection limits are laboratory performance figures, not windows in people.

Sources and dates

• World Anti-Doping Agency, 2026 Prohibited List, sections S2 and S2.2.3 read 2026-10-03.
• U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, sanctions table, read 2026-10-03: 1,075 entries; one naming AOD-9604 ("AOD-9064"), three BPC-157, four IGF-1.
• Stier H, Vos E, Kenley D. Safety and tolerability of the hexadecapeptide AOD9604 in humans. J Endocrinol Metab 2013;3(1-2):7–15 — doi 10.4021/jem157w, full text read 2026-10-03.
• Heffernan MA, Thorburn AW, Fam B, et al. Increase of fat oxidation and weight loss in obese mice caused by chronic treatment with human growth hormone or a modified C-terminal fragment. Int J Obes 2001;25:1442–9 — PMID 11673763
• Wilding J. AOD-9604 Metabolic. Curr Opin Investig Drugs 2004;5:436–40 — PMID 15134286
• Orlovius AK, Thomas A, Schänzer W, Thevis M. AOD-9604 does not influence the WADA hGH isoform immunoassay. Drug Test Anal 2013;5:850–2 — PMID 24124033
• Vanhee C, Moens G, Deconinck E, De Beer JO. Identification and characterization of peptide drugs in unknown pharmaceutical preparations seized by the Belgian authorities: case report on AOD9604. Drug Test Anal 2014;6:964–8 — PMID 24976118
• Cox HD, Smeal SJ, Hughes CM, Cox JE, Eichner D. Detection and in vitro metabolism of AOD9604. Drug Test Anal 2015;7:31–8 — PMID 25208511
• Thomas A, Görgens C, Guddat S, et al. Simplifying and expanding the screening for peptides <2 kDa by direct urine injection, liquid chromatography, and ion mobility mass spectrometry. J Sep Sci 2016;39:333–41 — PMID 26578461
• Kwon DR, Park GY. Effect of intra-articular injection of AOD9604 with or without hyaluronic acid in rabbit osteoarthritis model. Ann Clin Lab Sci 2015;45:426–32 — PMID 26275694
• PubMed E-utilities, "AOD9604 OR AOD-9604 OR AOD 9604": 23 records, 2026-10-03. ClinicalTrials.gov API v2, intervention searches "AOD9604" and "AOD-9604": 0, 2026-10-03. openFDA Drugs@FDA: no match, 2026-10-03.