WADA Status by Compound: Where Each Performance Peptide Sits on the 2026 Prohibited List

Every compound this site covers has a defined status under one document, and that document is public, dated and searchable. Almost nothing written for the gym audience quotes it directly. This page is the register: which section of the World Anti-Doping Agency's 2026 Prohibited List covers each compound, whether it is named in the text or caught by a description, and what class of substance it is.

The List used here came into force on 1 January 2026 and was published in September 2025. It was read section by section from WADA's own list explorer on 21 September 2026.

The register

The finding worth carrying: one stack, two sections

The single most-sold combination in the research-peptide market pairs BPC-157 with TB-500. Both are prohibited at all times. They are prohibited under different sections, for different reasons, with different consequences.

TB-500 is in S2.3 because of what it is. The entry reads "Thymosin-β4 and its derivatives e.g. TB-500", sitting between mechano growth factors and vascular endothelial growth factor. It is a growth factor, so the growth-factor section covers it.

BPC-157 is in S0 because of what it is not. S0's definition is regulatory, not pharmacological:

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 (e.g. drugs under pre-clinical or clinical development or discontinued, designer drugs, substances approved only for veterinary use) is prohibited at all times.

And the class's named examples are "BPC-157, 2,4-dinitrophenol (DNP), ryanodine receptor-1-calstabin complex stabilizers [e.g. S-107, S48168 (ARM210)] and troponin activators (e.g. reldesemtiv and tirasemtiv)".

Read carefully, that listing makes no claim about BPC-157's effects at all. It is prohibited because no health authority anywhere has approved it for human use — which is a statement about its regulatory file, and the same statement that would apply to any unapproved compound. Nothing in S0 asserts that it works.

The consequence is not cosmetic. Every substance in S0 is a Specified Substance; every substance in S2 is non-Specified. In WADA's own words, the Specified classification "potentially allows, under defined conditions, for a greater reduction of a sanction" — it is a sanctioning category, not a severity ranking, and it does not soften strict liability. An athlete who tested positive for the BPC-157 half of a stack and one who tested positive for the TB-500 half would arrive at a hearing in different procedural positions.

The sentence that covers what the List does not name

The most consequential line for this market is not a substance name. It is the closing clause of S2.3, which extends the section to:

other growth factors or growth factor modulators affecting muscle, tendon or ligament protein synthesis/degradation, vascularisation, energy utilization, regenerative capacity or fibre type switching.

That is a functional description, and it is close to a transcription of what research-peptide vendors say their products do. Add the header of S2 itself — the listed substances "and other substances with similar chemical structure or similar biological effect(s)" — and the "including, but not limited to" that opens every subsection, and the List is built on three independent catch-alls.

A compound therefore does not have to be named to be prohibited. It has to do what the seller claims it does. Any page that answers "is X banned?" by searching for X in the text is asking the wrong question; the right one is which description X answers to.

This is also why the "it's not on the list" claim is unreliable in the other direction. WADA prints its own caution on the search tool: an athlete who cannot find a substance should verify its status with their Anti-Doping Organization, which is the authoritative source for an individual case. This page is a register, not that source.

The compounds that are not there

Nothing on the legal-supplement side of this site appears anywhere in the 2026 List. Creatine, collagen peptides, HMB and beta-alanine are absent from every section. So is caffeine, which sits on WADA's separate Monitoring Program rather than the List itself.

Two entries near the boundary are worth stating exactly, because both are frequently misreported:

Platelet-rich plasma is not prohibited. WADA removed platelet-derived preparations from the List, and its stated reason is that studies do not demonstrate performance enhancement beyond a potential therapeutic effect. In the same breath it states that individual growth factors from any other source remain prohibited under S2 — so a PRP injection is permitted and an isolated growth factor is not, even though the first contains some of the second.

Colostrum is not specifically prohibited, and WADA advises against it anyway. Its position is that colostrum may contain prohibited growth factors which could influence the outcome of an anti-doping test, and that it therefore does not recommend ingestion of the product. That is the rare case where the governing body's guidance is stricter than its own rule.

How a compound gets on the List

WADA applies three criteria and a substance or method needs to satisfy any two:

1. It has the potential to enhance, or enhances, sport performance.
2. It represents an actual or potential health risk to the athlete.
3. It violates the spirit of sport.

Masking agents are prohibited separately. And — the criterion that catches most of this market — WADA states that a substance which has not been approved for human use is likely to be prohibited as well.

Two of three is a lower bar than most readers assume, and it explains an apparent oddity in the register above: several listed compounds have no evidence of enhancing anything. A compound with no approval, no efficacy data and a plausible risk profile can meet criteria two and three without ever meeting criterion one. Presence on the List is not a testimonial. The clearest case is the one this site has documented separately: the growth-hormone secretagogue class is fully listed and, as the class's trials show, its measured ceiling in humans is about a kilogram of lean mass with no strength gain, which is also what MK-677's own human trials report.

Naming, and why the same compound has three names

WADA's convention, stated on its own site, is to use the International Nonproprietary Name first, to add a commonly-used name in parentheses when that is better known, and to fall back on IUPAC nomenclature where no INN exists. This produces entries that look unfamiliar to anyone who knows a compound by its market name:

A search for "GHRP-2" against a naive copy of the List can therefore return nothing while the compound is plainly listed. This is the same failure mode this site has documented in the research literature, where the name a product is sold by is rarely the name its papers use.

What this register is and is not

It is a dated snapshot of one document, assembled so the status of each compound can be checked rather than asserted. It is not legal advice, not anti-doping advice, and not a substitute for an athlete's own Anti-Doping Organization. The List changes at least once a year — the next version is published in October and takes effect the following 1 January, and substances may be added at any time in exceptional circumstances.

For the wider question of how anti-doping rules, national drug law and marketing rules disagree with one another, three rulebooks give three different answers. For what a test actually looks for, and why a prohibited substance is not automatically a detected one, see what each drug test is looking for. And for the evidence side of the same compounds — what the trials measured rather than what the rules say — peptides versus steroids and peptides versus SARMs cover the two comparisons most often made.