Is ISRIB legal in the United Kingdom?

ISRIB is not an approved medicine anywhere. No person has taken it in a registered study. In mice, it brought back lost memory in old mice and in mice after a brain injury. That is the whole case.

ISRIB sits on this page as the odd one out. The other five drugs here are licensed medicines with years of safety data in people.

How it works: ISRIB works on a switch inside cells called eIF2B. That switch helps start the making of new proteins.

Approval history: Not approved for any use in any country. No registered human trial of ISRIB itself exists. A separate drug that works on the same target (eIF2B), fosigotifator, is being tested in people with vanishing white matter disease, a rare brain disease. Two of its trials were stopped early.

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 ISRIB 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 ISRIB 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 ISRIB 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.