# AOD-9604 Dosage in Research: Doses, Routes, and Half-Life

> AOD-9604 dosage as studied in the literature: the doses, species, and routes used in animal and human trials, plus the ~3-minute IV half-life. Research context only — no human dosing.

The doses and routes used across the published animal and human research — reported as research data, never as a human dosing instruction.

## Before the details

This page describes AOD-9604 dosage the way the studies recorded it — which animal got how much, by what route, for how long. It is **not** a how-to, and there is no recommended human dose here, because none exists: AOD-9604 is investigational and was never approved, so there is no labelled dose to cite. Reading research doses is useful for understanding the science; it is not a green light to copy a number.

The key facts in plain words: the compound was designed as an oral tablet and tested that way in humans. It clears the body extremely fast — its half-life after an intravenous dose was only about three minutes in an animal model. The human trials used small daily oral doses, on the order of a fraction of a milligram up to a few tens of milligrams. And crucially, even at the doses tested, the pivotal human trial did not produce weight loss beyond placebo. So the numbers below describe what was studied, not what works.

## Doses used in the research

Across the published record, AOD-9604 (and its parent fragment) was studied at a range of doses by route and species:

- **Obese mice, chronic dosing:** a 14-day chronic intraperitoneal course in obese and beta-3-adrenergic-knockout mice, used to characterise the weight, fat, and receptor-expression effects [1].
- **Obese mice, fat-oxidation studies:** chronic administration of the modified C-terminal fragment, increasing fat oxidation and producing weight loss [2].
- **Human Phase I, intravenous:** single intravenous doses across roughly `25-400 mcg/kg` in early Metabolic Pharmaceuticals pharmacokinetic studies.
- **Human Phase II, oral:** daily oral doses ranging from `0.25 mg` up to `54 mg` across studies; the 24-week trial used `0.25 mg`, `0.5 mg`, and `1 mg` per day [5].
- **Rabbit knee osteoarthritis, intra-articular:** `0.25 mg per knee`, weekly for 4-7 weeks, with or without `6 mg hyaluronic acid` [7].

Reported strictly as research data: `0.25-1 mg/day oral, 24-week human obesity trial`; `14-day chronic IP, obese mice`; `0.25 mg/knee weekly IA, rabbit OA model`.

## Half-life and clearance

AOD-9604 is cleared quickly. In a pig pharmacokinetic model, the intravenous half-life was approximately `3 minutes`, and the intact peptide degrades by sequential removal of amino acids from its N-terminus in a cascade fashion [6]. A half-life this short means circulating levels of the intact peptide do not persist, which is part of why the human program relied on an oral formulation taken regularly rather than on injection. Subcutaneous human pharmacokinetics have not been published in the peer-reviewed literature, so the published picture is largely intravenous and oral, in animal models and the human trials.

## Routes studied and stability

Four routes appear in the literature [5] [6] [7]:

- **Oral** — the primary route in the human obesity program, the form AOD-9604 was developed for.
- **Intravenous** — Phase I human pharmacokinetics and the animal PK studies.
- **Intra-articular** — the rabbit knee osteoarthritis model.
- **Intraperitoneal / continuous infusion** — preclinical mouse studies.

On stability, the peptide's intramolecular disulfide bridge makes it relatively stable in lyophilised (freeze-dried) form, while in plasma it is rapidly broken down from the N-terminus by enzymes [6]. Formal long-term stability data under varied storage conditions has not been published in the primary clinical literature, which is one more reason research-grade material of uncertain origin carries real uncertainty about what it actually contains.

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A patient, plain-spoken teaching digest of the AOD-9604 record — the strong rodent fat-loss data and the human trial that came up empty held side by side and cited to source; no clinic behind the desk, and nothing here dosed, sourced, prescribed, or sold.