What it is
Adipotide is not a peptide in the sense most of this library's entries are. It is a construct with two jobs bolted together: a short targeting sequence, CKGGRAKDC, and a second sequence whose function is to kill whatever cell it ends up inside by wrecking its mitochondria.
The targeting half binds prohibitin, a protein found on the surface of the blood vessels that supply white fat. The intended result is that the construct accumulates on fat tissue's blood supply, destroys it, and the fat dies for want of circulation.
This is worth stating plainly because it makes adipotide unlike everything it is sold beside. Tesamorelin, an approved drug for a narrow use, AOD-9604 and 5-amino-1MQ are all supposed to work through signalling — growth hormone, lipolysis, an enzyme. Adipotide is designed to destroy tissue. Whether one prefers that approach is beside the point; they are not the same kind of thing, and the risk profile of a deliberate cell-killing agent is not the risk profile of a signalling molecule.
The work came out of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, from a research programme on the blood vessels of fat tissue in the laboratory of Wadih Arap and Renata Pasqualini.
The published record
14 PubMed records name the compound or its targeting sequence as of 2026-09-13. That literature is preclinical: mice, rats and rhesus monkeys. The monkey study is the one every vendor page points at, and it is real work — it is also a study in monkeys.
The registry finding, and why it matters beyond this compound
Search ClinicalTrials.gov for adipotide and it returns zero results. Nothing. On the evidence of that search, the compound has never been near a human being.
That conclusion would be wrong. Search prohibitin instead and the registry returns exactly one study:
NCT01262664 — A First-in-Man, Phase I Evaluation of A Single Cycle of Prohibitin Targeting Peptide 1 in Patients With Metastatic Prostate Cancer and Obesity. Sponsor: M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Study type: interventional, phase 1. Intervention listed as the drug Prohibitin-TP01. Start date 2012-05-24. Status: TERMINATED. Reason given: terminated per PI's request. Actual enrolment: 4.
The word adipotide appears nowhere in the record. The trial was filed under the scientific description of the mechanism, and the market settled on a different name entirely.
This library has already documented the opposite error — a keyword search for Cartalax that returns a record belonging to an unrelated nutritional formula, which would make an untested compound look registered. This is that mistake running the other way: a real trial invisible to the obvious search, which would make a tested compound look untested. Both have the same remedy. A registry search is a starting point, not a count; search the mechanism, the sponsor and the development code, and open what comes back.
What the one trial does and does not tell us
Four people. A study designed to find an acceptable dose, with biologic activity as its second primary outcome, stopped at the investigator's request with four participants enrolled and no results posted.
A dose-finding study that ends at four has not found a dose. There is no published safety profile, no reported adverse events, and no body-weight outcome in a person anywhere in this compound's file.
Two further features of that trial are usually missed, and they matter more than the enrolment number.
It was not a weight-loss trial. The participants were men with metastatic prostate cancer, and obesity was a second eligibility criterion deciding which of those men could enrol. That is the standard and proper design for the first human exposure to an agent that kills cells: you do not give it first to healthy volunteers. It also means that even a completed version of this study would have told us about tolerability in men with advanced cancer — not about fat loss in anyone well.
The timeline is the quiet finding. The study opened in May 2012. It is now 2026. Nothing has replaced it, and the registry holds no second attempt by anyone. A compound with a published non-human-primate result and a first-in-man study that stalled at four patients has had fourteen years in which a successor trial could have appeared. None has.
Where it stands
No approved product, and no application for one — Drugs@FDA and DailyMed both returned nothing on 2026-09-13.
It is sold as a research powder, priced and marketed alongside the metabolic peptides, with the monkey study doing the persuading. The human record is one abandoned trial in four men with cancer, filed under a name the sellers never use.
For compounds in the same market with different mechanisms and different evidence, see AOD-9604, tesamorelin and the non-peptide 5-amino-1MQ; for the general question of what these molecules are, what peptides are.