Where to buy AOD-9604.

You can buy AOD-9604 from research-supply vendors online, and that's the only working route, because no regulator has approved it and no pharmacy dispenses it. Where to buy AOD-9604 really asks which vendor can demonstrate that the vial holds a correctly folded 16-residue fragment. Its own 24-week Phase IIb trial missed its endpoint.

Research compounds

Referenced in this guide

Batch-matched COAHPLC + mass specResearch use only

Third-party tested research compounds, each shipped with a batch-matched certificate of analysis showing HPLC purity and mass-spec identity — the documentation this site argues you should hold any supplier to.

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• CoA. Certificate of Analysis. A one-page lab report showing the specific lot’s identity, purity, and contamination testing.
• ISO/IEC 17025. The international quality standard for testing labs. A 17025-accredited lab has been audited by a third party for technical competence.
• GRAS. Generally Recognized as Safe. An FDA framework for food ingredients. Not a drug approval, and not a statement about efficacy.
• Disulfide bridge. A covalent bond between two cysteine sulfurs that locks a peptide into a specific fold. AOD-9604 has one, between residues 7 and 14.
• Ellman’s reagent. A colorimetric assay that quantifies free, unbonded thiol groups. It's how a lab proves a disulfide actually formed.
• Lyophilized. Freeze-dried into a stable powder. Lyophilized peptides survive short room-temperature transit and store for years frozen.

Where can you buy AOD-9604?

AOD-9604 comes from research-supply vendors, and almost nowhere else. A second, odder channel exists because of the 2014 GRAS food filing, and a handful of supplement-adjacent sellers use it. The compounding and clinic route is effectively closed, because no regulator anywhere has approved the compound.

• Research-supply vendors, the dominant channel. Nearly all AOD-9604 in circulation moves through vendors selling lyophilized powder labeled for laboratory research use only. That labeling is what makes the sale lawful in the US. The vendor isn't a pharmacy, the material isn't for human use, and the documentation burden falls on you.
• The “GRAS ingredient” supplement channel, the oddity. A GRAS self-determination dossier was submitted in 2014 for AOD-9604 as a food or dietary ingredient. A class of supplement-adjacent sellers presents the compound as a legitimized ingredient rather than an unapproved drug.
• Compounding and clinic channels, largely closed. A 503A pharmacy can in principle compound a peptide against a prescription. AOD-9604 has no approved-drug basis at FDA, EMA or the Australian TGA, so US compounders won't touch it.

Require five things from that first channel. A third-party CoA from a named ISO 17025-accredited lab. HPLC purity ≥99% with the chromatogram. Mass-spec identity. Disulfide-integrity data. Endotoxin testing by LAL.

The GRAS dossier is real. What it means is narrow. A sponsor concluded the substance is safe for use in food, under a framework that never evaluates therapeutic efficacy. It isn't a drug approval, it doesn't license obesity claims, and it doesn't upgrade the clinical evidence by one paper.

We read any vendor whose regulatory section leans on GRAS to imply approval with real skepticism everywhere else on the page too. Clinic-channel offers of “pharmaceutical-grade” AOD-9604 are a claim about marketing rather than about manufacturing.

Which research-supply vendors to shortlist

Six vendors, ordered the way our supplier comparison orders them — on what each one will show you rather than what it claims — with every column pulled from the vendor's own storefront on 13 August 2026; there is no verified AOD-9604 price anywhere in that set, so pricing is benchmarked on BPC-157 across the same vendors and no price column appears here.

† Behemoth Labz publishes real certificates, but the newest genuine document we could open was dated 2024-08-08 — roughly two years old, which is why freshness matters more here than the existence of a PDF. Stock varies by compound, so confirm a vendor actually lists AOD-9604 before you compare — what these columns describe is disclosure practice, and that is the part that travels across every compound a vendor sells. Disclosure: this site earns a commission on purchases made through its links, and Peptriva is one of the vendors it links to. Every column above is a document you can open or a page you can load yourself.

The identity check to run against whichever vendor you pick is CAS 221231-10-3 on the certificate's identity line with an observed mass of 1815.08 g/mol, plus explicit confirmation that the Cys7–Cys14 disulfide bridge is intact rather than a purity figure alone.

What is AOD-9604?

AOD-9604 stands for “Anti-Obesity Drug 9604”. It was developed at Monash University in the 1990s and licensed to Metabolic Pharmaceuticals in Australia. It's the C-terminal fragment of human growth hormone, residues 176–191, with an N-terminal tyrosine added for stability. Full-length hGH is a 191-residue protein. This is the last sixteen residues of it.

The design logic was, we'd say, genuinely elegant. Growth hormone drives lipolysis. It also raises IGF-1, promotes growth, and degrades insulin sensitivity, which are the receptor-mediated effects that limit clinical hGH use. Isolate the lipolytic domain, the reasoning went, and you keep the fat-cell signal while leaving the receptor untouched.

AOD-9604 does appear to have achieved the selectivity half of that goal. It has little measurable affinity for the canonical growth hormone receptor. What it never achieved was translation.

The proposed mechanism is direct lipolytic action on adipocytes, through a putative “hGH 176-191 receptor” or a β3-adrenergic-like adipose pathway. That rests on rodent work, and the receptor in question has never been definitively identified in the twenty-five years since.

So the sequence on the vial matters more than usual. Written out it's Tyr-Leu-Arg-Ile-Val-Gln-Cys-Arg-Ser-Val-Glu-Gly-Ser-Cys-Gly-Phe. Sixteen residues, two cysteines, one intramolecular disulfide bridge between them.

Legitimate AOD-9604 is a white lyophilized cake in a sealed glass vial. It's stable at −20 °C for up to 36 months and at 2–8 °C for around 12. Reconstituted, the in-use window is near 28 days refrigerated.

Reducing agents such as DTT, BME and TCEP cleave the bridge and abolish the fold. That's one reason we don't treat the disulfide line on a CoA as a formality.

How do you verify AOD-9604 before you buy?

Five checks sharpen considerably for a short growth-hormone fragment like AOD-9604. Confirm CAS, formula and intact mass. Demand the disulfide assay. Treat purity and identity as separate questions. Check counter-ion and endotoxin accounting. Read the GRAS language literally. Our eight general criteria apply on top.

1. CAS number, formula, and intact mass

The CAS Registry Number for AOD-9604 is 221231-10-3 and the molecular formula is C₇₈H₁₂₃N₂₃O₂₃S₂. Mass spectrometry on the CoA should report identity against a specification of m/z 1815.08 ± 0.5.

A CoA that omits the CAS number, or reports a mass without stating the acceptance window, is giving you a number rather than a check. If the observed mass sits outside that window, the vial doesn't contain AOD-9604. No interpretation rescues it.

2. Disulfide-bridge integrity, the check almost nobody publishes

This is the single most AOD-specific line on a CoA, and most vendor certificates don't have it. AOD-9604's Cys7–Cys14 bridge defines the folded conformation the whole lipolytic hypothesis was built around.

A reduced, linear chain has the same amino acids in the same order and will satisfy a sequence-identity check. Forming a disulfide removes two hydrogens, so the linear chain reads only about 2 Da heavier. That gap is narrow enough to vanish inside a sloppy mass window.

Ellman's reagent measures free thiol directly, and a credible specification is ≥95% oxidized. Material tested at 97.2% oxidized tells you something a purity percentage never can.

3. The fragment-counterfeit problem

A 16-residue peptide with no acylation, no non-natural residues and no cyclization is cheap and fast to synthesize almost anywhere. That cuts both ways. It keeps legitimate AOD-9604 inexpensive, and it makes substitution economically attractive.

Shorter truncations, the fragment without its stabilizing N-terminal tyrosine, scrambled sequences and bulk-filler blends are all cheaper than the real thing. All of them pass a visual inspection of a white lyophilized cake.

The consequence is that HPLC purity isn't an identity test. A vial can be 99% pure and 100% the wrong molecule. The chromatogram only says the material is homogeneous, not that it's what the label claims.

For fragment peptides, identity data is the load-bearing part of the certificate and purity is secondary. That means mass spec plus the disulfide assay. Vendors who publish only a purity percentage for AOD-9604 have published the less informative half.

4. Counter-ion and endotoxin accounting

Peptides ship as salts, and the counter-ion is real mass in the vial that isn't peptide. A CoA should state the counter-ion and its content. For AOD-9604, acetate below roughly 12% w/w is a reasonable specification, with well-controlled material landing nearer 6%.

Endotoxin by LAL below 1.0 EU/mg and a bioburden line round out the safety-adjacent section. Without these, the milligram figure on the label is a nominal number rather than a measured one.

5. The GRAS-versus-approval check

Read the vendor's regulatory language literally. “GRAS” and “FDA-approved” are different frameworks with different evidentiary bars, and only one of them evaluates whether a substance does anything. AOD-9604 has the first and has never had the second. Marketing that slides between them is the clearest signal that a supplier will misrepresent the record.

What does AOD-9604 cost in 2026?

AOD-9604 costs $30–$60 for the standard 5 mg vial and $55–$100 for 10 mg at third-party tested retail. It's inexpensive to make: sixteen residues, standard amino acids, one oxidation step to close the disulfide, then repurification.

• 2 mg vial: $18–$35, or $9–$18 per mg. An uncommon entry size; the per-mg penalty is steep.
• 5 mg vial: $30–$60, or $6–$12 per mg. The standard retail presentation and the best per-mg value at most vendors.
• 10 mg vial: $55–$100, or $6–$10 per mg. The per-mg curve flattens here rather than dropping further.
• Multi-vial discounts: 10–25% off on 3-packs and 6-packs is typical across the market.

Pricing meaningfully below $20 per 5 mg vial deserves a direct question about the oxidation and repurification steps. Closing the Cys7–Cys14 bridge under controlled conditions, then re-running HPLC on the folded product, is where the cost sits.

It's also exactly the step a producer skips when competing on price, because the crude linear chain looks identical on a label.

The other pricing trap runs the opposite way. AOD-9604 gets marketed as the affordable alternative to GLP-1-class research compounds, which run an order of magnitude higher per vial.

That price gap is a synthesis fact. Incretin analogs are 31–39 residues with lipidation and specialized coupling chemistry. It isn't a value judgment and it isn't evidence about either compound. Reading cheapness as efficiency inverts the actual comparison: one class has a decisive human trial record, and the other has a negative pivotal readout.

Is AOD-9604 legal to buy?

Yes. AOD-9604 is legal to buy and sell in the US as a research reference compound labeled for laboratory use only. Its regulatory position is unusual mainly because there's a real filing to point at, just not the one vendors imply.

• United States, FDA: Not approved as a drug for any indication. Not a controlled substance. A GRAS self-determination dossier was submitted by the sponsor in 2014 for use as a food or dietary ingredient, which is a food-safety category rather than drug approval. Selling it for human consumption with obesity-indication claims is not legal.
• European Union, EMA: Not approved.
• Australia, TGA: Not approved as a drug, despite the compound’s Australian origin and sponsor.
• WADA: Not explicitly listed by name. The S2 class covers growth hormone, its fragments and releasing factors. See the WADA Prohibited List for current categorizations.
• Major sports leagues: Not explicitly prohibited by name.

That WADA line is the trap worth dwelling on if you're athletic-adjacent. “Not on the list” is doing much less work than it appears to.

The S2 category is written to cover growth hormone and its fragments as a class. AOD-9604 is, by construction and by its own product name, a C-terminal fragment of human growth hormone. Class-based prohibitions don't require a name listing to apply. A vendor advertizing AOD-9604 as “not banned” is quoting the index rather than the category text.

What are the red flags when buying AOD-9604?

Eight AOD-9604 warning signs we’d walk away from:

• “FDA approved” or “FDA GRAS approved.” The FDA has never approved AOD-9604 as a drug. GRAS self-determination is a sponsor-submitted food-ingredient framework. Any page that merges the two is misrepresenting the regulatory record.
• No disulfide-integrity line on the CoA. For this molecule, a purity number without an oxidation-state measurement leaves the most likely quality failure untested.
• Purity reported without mass-spec identity. A short fragment is the easiest peptide class to counterfeit with cheaper material. Purity describes homogeneity; only identity data tells you what the homogeneous substance is.
• Marketing that skips the Phase IIb result. A 24-week trial in more than 500 obese participants missed its endpoint and ended the obesity program. A vendor page that narrates the rodent lipolysis story and stops there has made an editorial decision.
• “GH benefits without GH side effects.” The compound was specifically designed to avoid GH-receptor signaling. Claims of GH-equivalent effects on body composition, recovery, or IGF-1-mediated outcomes are pharmacologically inconsistent with the molecule’s own design premise.
• “Not banned by WADA” as a selling point. Class coverage of GH fragments under S2 makes the absence of a name listing weak reassurance, and a vendor leading with it is selling to the wrong reading.
• No named accredited lab. Internal QC isn’t third-party verification. The report should name the ISO/IEC 17025-accredited lab that ran the tests.
• Pre-reconstituted solution without cold chain. The in-use window for reconstituted AOD-9604 is roughly 28 days refrigerated, and the bridge is vulnerable to reducing conditions. Lyophilized powder is the form that survives shipping.

AOD-9604

5 mg ≥99% pure Lyophilized

16-residue hGH 176-191 fragment with the intramolecular Cys7–Cys14 bridge intact, CAS 221231-10-3, formula C₇₈H₁₂₃N₂₃O₂₃S₂. third-party tested reference compound; COA with HPLC trace, mass-spec identity, Ellman’s disulfide check, and acetate counter-ion content on every lot.

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Frequently asked questions

Is AOD-9604 legal to buy in the USA?

Yes, as a research reference compound labeled for laboratory use only. AOD-9604 isn't FDA-approved as a drug and isn't a controlled substance. Selling it for human consumption with obesity-indication claims crosses into FDA drug jurisdiction. Buying it as research material does not.

What should an AOD-9604 CoA show?

Five lines at minimum. CAS 221231-10-3 on the identity line. Mass-spec identity against a stated window of 1815.08 ± 0.5. HPLC purity ≥99% with the chromatogram attached. Disulfide-bridge integrity by Ellman's reagent at ≥95% oxidized. Endotoxin below 1.0 EU/mg by LAL.

Acetate counter-ion content and bioburden round it out, and the ISO/IEC 17025-accredited lab should be named. Our walkthrough is here: how to read a Certificate of Analysis.

Does the AOD-9604 GRAS filing mean the FDA approved it?

No. GRAS is a food-ingredient framework, and the 2014 filing was a sponsor self-determination for AOD-9604 as a food or dietary ingredient. It evaluates safety for use in food. It doesn't evaluate efficacy for any indication, it doesn't authorize therapeutic claims, and it isn't a drug approval. That distinction is the single most exploited gap in AOD-9604 marketing.

Why does a 16-residue fragment need extra identity verification?

Because short fragments are the cheapest peptides to counterfeit. Sixteen standard residues with no acylation and no non-natural chemistry can be made almost anywhere.

Truncations, the fragment minus its N-terminal tyrosine, or a reduced chain that never had its bridge closed are all cheap and visually undetectable. A purity number describes homogeneity only. Mass spec plus the disulfide assay establishes identity.

Is AOD-9604 prohibited in sport?

AOD-9604 isn't named on the WADA Prohibited List. The S2 category covers growth hormone, its fragments and releasing factors as a class, and AOD-9604 is structurally a growth hormone fragment. So class coverage is a live question rather than a settled one. Anyone subject to anti-doping testing should treat non-listing as unresolved and consult their governing body.

Why is AOD-9604 so much cheaper than GLP-1-class research peptides?

Synthesis length and chemistry. AOD-9604 is 16 residues with one disulfide. Incretin analogs are 31–39 residues with lipidation and specialized coupling steps. The price difference reflects the manufacturing route and nothing else. The evidence difference runs the other way entirely, which we cover in our GLP-1 class comparison.

How does AOD-9604 compare to tesamorelin?

They aren't the same category of evidence. Tesamorelin is a stabilized GHRH analog with FDA approval in a specific indication and a corresponding trial record. AOD-9604 is an unapproved hGH C-terminal fragment whose pivotal obesity trial was negative. Both sit on the growth-hormone axis. Only one has a regulator's efficacy finding behind it. See where to buy tesamorelin.