Product Overview
Acadesine, known almost everywhere by the short form AICAR, is a nucleoside analogue rather than a peptide, even though the vial occupies a peptide shelf in this catalogue. Generic Peptides lists two fills, 50 mg and 100 mg, both as freeze-dried powder intended for laboratory work. Chemically it is the riboside of AICA, and once inside a cell it is phosphorylated into ZMP, the nucleotide that flips on AMP-activated protein kinase.
The medical record behind the molecule is longer than that of most research reagents. From the 1980s it was investigated as a protectant of heart muscle during ischaemia and as a treatment in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, and Schering-Plough took a licence on it in 2007. The phase III cardiac programme was stopped at the end of 2010 because it did not deliver the benefit the earlier work had promised, and that is the moment the compound turned into a laboratory reference rather than a developing drug.
AMPK itself is the fuel gauge of the cell. When ATP runs low, the kinase turns down expensive building work and turns up glucose uptake and fat oxidation. AICAR throws that switch without any fall in the cell's energy charge, which is exactly what made exercise scientists pay attention, and also why anti-doping authorities classify the substance as a metabolic modulator rather than as a hormone.
Dosage Protocol
There is no approved human amount, and the trial that could have produced one was abandoned. What can be written down honestly is the arithmetic of dilution plus the figures the animal literature used, which are not a schedule for a person.
| Animal reference | 0.5 mg per gram of body weight each day, injected under the skin for 14 days in the mouse work |
| Vendor figures | Scattered between roughly 1-3 mg a day and much larger amounts, with no shared protocol across sellers |
| Route in studies | Subcutaneous injection in animal models; the human cardiology work used intravenous infusion instead |
| 50 mg in 2 ml | 25 mg/ml, so a 0.1 ml pull carries 2.5 mg |
| 50 mg in 5 ml | 10 mg/ml, so a 0.1 ml pull carries 1 mg |
| 100 mg in 5 ml | 20 mg/ml, so a 0.1 ml pull carries 2 mg |
| 100 mg in 10 ml | 10 mg/ml, so a 0.1 ml pull carries 1 mg, the same as the diluted 50 mg fill |
| Female | No confirmed protocol in the sources checked; nothing published describes a separate female schedule |
Bacteriostatic water is added down the wall of the vial and the powder is allowed to dissolve without violent shaking. The dry powder keeps at 2-8 C away from light, and the made-up solution also stays at 2-8 C, where it is usable for about 28-30 days; freezing is avoided because a thaw cycle damages this class of molecule. Because elimination from plasma takes about an hour and the working metabolite is generated inside the cell, the timing of any sample or measurement is at least as important as the amount written on the label.
Suggested Protocols
Nothing on this shelf is studied as a combination with acadesine, so the groupings below are bench comparisons from the same catalogue section rather than a regimen. Each one answers a question a reader is likely to be asking: what else acts on the same fuel-sensing pathway, what else is bought for fat loss, and what belongs on the recovery side.
What to Expect
- Endurance in mice, not in people. The headline result of 2008 was better running performance in untrained animals, and nothing comparable has been published for humans.
- A fibre-type shift on paper. The same rodent work reported fast fibres taking on oxidative characteristics, which is the observation the endurance claim rests on.
- Glucose movement up. AMPK activation increases glucose uptake into skeletal muscle in models, and p38 MAPK alpha and beta activity rises with it.
- Overlap with training. In mice given AICAR together with the research compound GW501516, roughly 40 percent of the genes that shift with exercise also shifted, which is a partial overlap rather than a substitute for training.
- Fast plasma clearance. Around one hour in human plasma, so what lingers is the intracellular nucleotide rather than the parent molecule in circulation.
- No human outcome data. The cardiac programme failed and stopped; the compound has no approval anywhere and no legal status as a medicine.
Side Effects and Management
There is no monitored human safety file for the amounts sold here, so the list mixes what the cardiac trial watched for with the ordinary events of injecting a research powder. Management is observational in every row.
Post-Cycle Therapy
The answer here needs no invention, because there is nothing to recover. Acadesine is not an androgen, does not aromatise, and does not suppress luteinising hormone or sperm production, so the drugs used to restart a hormonal axis after an anabolic course have no target in this line.
