Is Adropin legal in the United Kingdom?

A secreted peptide whose blood level falls with obesity and age in humans. Every human study is a measurement, not a treatment: no one has given adropin to a person, and the cognitive benefit that gets quoted was in aging mice.

Adropin is encoded by ENHO and circulates at low nanogram per millilitre concentrations. It came out of mouse work suggesting a peptide required for metabolic homeostasis and for preventing obesity-associated insulin resistance.

Mechanism: A secreted peptide that in animal work influences fuel selection, favouring glucose over fatty acid oxidation in muscle, and improves insulin sensitivity and endothelial function. Receptor biology is unsettled: GPR19 has been proposed and is disputed, and a 2025 review frames adropin as a cardio-metabolic hormone in the periphery and a neurohormone in the brain, which is a way of saying the mechanism differs by tissue and is not pinned down in either.

Regulatory history: Not a drug. Adropin is an endogenous peptide measured in research studies. No adropin product is approved anywhere and no interventional human trial has been registered.

Licenses medicines for the UK market. A compound without a marketing authorisation is an unlicensed medicine, which can only lawfully be supplied for human use through a prescriber under the specials scheme, not sold as a research product.

The classification above is the The Longevity Archive reading of Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency listings for Adropin at the reviewed date, not a legal opinion. Rules change, and importing, prescribing and possessing a compound can each be treated differently. Check the regulator directly before acting on anything here.