Tesamorelin half-life and steady state
36 min modelled half-life, peaking 15 min after a dose. What that means for how long it lasts, how much it builds up, and when bloodwork is worth drawing.
- Also known as
- Egrifta, TH9507
- Class
- GH Secretagogues
- Modelled half-life
- 36 min
- Time to peak
- 15 min
- Formulation
- Aqueous (reconstituted powder)
- Cleared per dosing interval
- 100% gone, 0% still present after 24 h
- Time to steady state
- ~3 h (about five half-lives)
- Accumulation at that cadence
- 1× — effectively none; each dose clears before the next
- Peak-to-trough at steady state
- Not meaningful — the level returns to zero between doses, so there is no trough to divide into a peak
- Regulatory status
- FDA APPROVED for HIV-associated lipodystrophy. Off-label use for general body composition and cognitive health.
- Monitoring panel
- IGF-1 every 3 months (critical), fasting glucose, HbA1c, visceral fat assessment, lipid panel.
- Before mixing
- Sealed powder tolerates room temperature in transit, but keep it refrigerated at 2–8 °C (36–46 °F) for anything beyond a few weeks, or frozen for months. Keep it dark — the carton it shipped in is doing a job.
- After mixing
- Once reconstituted with bacteriostatic water: refrigerate at 2–8 °C and use within about 28 days. The benzyl alcohol in bacteriostatic water is what buys that window — plain sterile water has no preservative, so a vial mixed with it should be treated as one sitting only. Kits are usually ten vials: only the one you mixed is on that 28-day clock — the sealed ones keep their own, much longer shelf life, so store them as powder, not as solution.
- What ruins it
- Do not freeze a reconstituted vial. Repeated freeze–thaw is one of the more reliable ways to degrade a peptide.
- Handling caveat
- General handling practice for this formulation. Your supplier’s own insert or COA overrides anything here.
Tesamorelin's half-life of roughly forty minutes makes it the shortest-lived compound on this site, and it is also — unusually for this category — an FDA-approved medicine, licensed for HIV-associated lipodystrophy. That combination is worth pausing on: the published pharmacokinetics here are regulatory-grade rather than inferred, which is not true of most peptides people compare it against.
Being a stabilised GHRH analogue, it shares CJC-1295 without DAC's logic — a short pulse of GHRH signalling, then clearance, leaving the pituitary's feedback intact. No accumulation, no steady state, and a schedule driven by timing rather than by maintaining a level. The trans-3-hexenoyl group at its N-terminus is what protects it from the enzyme that degrades native GHRH within minutes; it buys tens of minutes, not days, and that was the design target.
The clinically interesting consequence of a short-acting GHRH analogue is that its downstream marker moves on a completely different timescale from the drug. IGF-1 rises over weeks and reflects accumulated growth hormone exposure, not this morning's injection — which is why the monitoring interval in the app's entry is quarterly and why a single IGF-1 says little about whether a dose was taken. Approved use aside, tesamorelin is also used off-label for body composition, and the app's entry records both; the visceral-fat findings that support its licensed indication came from trials in a specific population, and generalising them is exactly the step the labelling does not take.
One dose
pkCurve function — a
one-compartment absorption-and-elimination model with the absorption rate fitted so the
peak lands at the published time to peak.Dosed once daily
Charted at once daily because that is the daily subcutaneous schedule of its approved use. It is what the numbers below are indexed to, not a recommendation about frequency — that is a prescribing decision.
The arithmetic behind those numbers
fraction left after one interval = 2^(−40.00) = 0.000
accumulation ratio = 1 ÷ (1 − 0.000) = 1
time to steady state ≈ 5 × half-life = 3 h
peak-to-trough = not meaningful; the trough is 0 of a single dose's peak, i.e. cleared
The accumulation ratio is a closed form; the peak-to-trough figure is not. The generator adds up enough repeated curves for the total to stop changing, then reads the highest and lowest points of the last interval — which is what steady state means in practice. The vertical axis is relative, not a concentration: the shape and the ratios carry across people, the absolute levels do not.
Interaction rules that name Tesamorelin
From the app's own interaction data. Not exhaustive, and not a safety clearance — a combination that is not listed is one nobody has documented here, which is not the same as one that is fine. The full combination checker has the rest.
Excellent GHRH + GHRP Synergistic Pairing
Tesamorelin (GHRH analogue) and Ipamorelin (GHRP) work synergistically to produce larger GH pulses than either alone — the GHRH primes the somatotrophs and the GHRP amplifies the pulse. This is the FDA-validated compound type pairing with the most evidence.
What to watch: IGF-1 every 3 months, fasting glucose, HbA1c.
The dosing rows this cadence came from
Established clinical use Reproduced from the app's entry so you can see what the chart above is indexed to. Which row applies to a particular person, if any, is a clinical decision this page does not make.
| Label | Amount | Route and frequency |
|---|---|---|
| FDA Approved use | 2mg/day | SubQ daily |
| Off-label body composition | 1-2mg/day | SubQ daily fasted AM or pre-bed |
| Standard | 1mg/day | SubQ injection, morning |
| Body Composition | 2mg/day | SubQ injection, morning fasted |
When to draw bloodwork
The panel the app records for Tesamorelin is: IGF-1 every 3 months (critical), fasting glucose, HbA1c, visceral fat assessment, lipid panel.. The pharmacokinetic point is the timing rather than the list: after any change, a level takes about 3 h to settle, so a panel drawn sooner measures something still moving. And because this compound clears completely between doses, a serum level says only what the last few hours did — which is why the marker worth following here is a downstream one measured over weeks, not the compound itself. Whether a result means anything is a question for the clinician who ordered it, read against the reference range your own lab printed. The lab-marker pages cover what the individual analytes measure.
Related: the interactive half-life calculator to try other cadences.
The app draws this curve from the doses you actually logged — your dates, your cadence — and projects seven days forward from the last one.
Save this dose to your log