Is Galanin legal in the United Kingdom?

Galanin has been dripped into healthy volunteers since 1986, and every one of those studies measured a hormone or blood pressure. In people it strongly raises growth hormone, and half of it is gone from the blood in about 3.7 minutes. In one drip study, resting heart rate rose from 70 to 99 beats a minute. Nobody has ever tested thinking with it.

Galanin is the peptide in this group with the longest record of being given to people. It also has the widest gap between that record and its name as a brain booster.

How it works: Shown in the body in people, only a guess for the brain. Galanin acts on three receptors: GALR1, GALR2 and GALR3.

Approval history: Galanin is a peptide the body makes. It is not a medicine. No galanin product, and no drug that switches on its receptors, is approved anywhere. We found no active work to develop it as a drug. The human studies are university experiments from the 1980s and 1990s on how the body works, not an effort to make a drug.

Licenses medicines for sale in the UK. A compound without a licence to be sold (a marketing authorisation) is an unlicensed medicine. The law only lets it reach people through a prescriber, under the specials scheme (unlicensed medicines made for one patient's needs). It cannot be sold as a research product.

The legal category above is how The Longevity Archive reads Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency listings for Galanin on the reviewed date. It is not a legal opinion. Rules change. Bringing a compound into the country, prescribing it and owning it can each be treated differently. Check with the agency before you act on anything here.

Check MHRA directly

Whether Galanin is banned in sport is set by the World Anti-Doping Code and by military rules, not by its legal status in the United Kingdom. Before you compete or get tested, look up Galanin by name on the Prohibited List, or look up a named product in Global DRO. Under the World Anti-Doping Code, category S0 bans, at all times, any drug-like substance that meets two tests. No other section of the List covers it. And no government health regulator anywhere has a current approval for it as a treatment in people. Many substances that are approved somewhere are banned by name in another section. So approval does not mean a substance is allowed in sport.

• WADA Prohibited List
• Global DRO (check a named product)
• USADA (US athletes)
• Operation Supplement Safety (US service members)

The rules you compete or serve under decide this, not this page.