DSIP Dosage Guide: Reported Ranges, Sleep Evidence & Reconstitution

DSIP at a glance

What it is

DSIP (Trp-Ala-Gly-Gly-Asp-Ala-Ser-Gly-Glu) — a nonapeptide first isolated in the 1970s from the cerebral venous blood of rabbits in induced sleep, and named for that observation rather than for a confirmed mechanism.

Researched for

Sleep onset and quality in chronic insomnia; also studied as an opioid-withdrawal adjunct and, once, as an anaesthesia adjunct.

Commonly reported range

Community sources describe roughly 100-250 mcg subcutaneously before bed; the human trials instead used about 25 nmol/kg intravenously.

Route reported

Every published human trial used the intravenous route. Subcutaneous injection is what community sources describe.

Reported frequency

Community reports describe nightly or a few nights per week, often cycled; the trials used single or short courses of administrations.

Mechanism

Unknown. No receptor, gene or precursor protein for DSIP has been formally identified in five decades of study.

Plasma half-life

Reported at roughly 7-15 minutes in early intravenous human work — very short, and a poor match for a compound expected to act across a night.

Regulatory status

Not FDA-approved for any use, and never brought through a modern registration programme anywhere. Research/educational use only.

Reported ranges from research/community — examples, not recommendations.

What it is / mechanism

The honest position on DSIP's mechanism is that after five decades there isn't one. No receptor has been cloned, no gene encoding it has been identified, and no precursor protein has been characterised — a state of affairs summarised in Kovalzon and Strekalova's 2006 review, which called the peptide a still unresolved riddle and remains the standard reference for exactly that reason. For a molecule discovered in the 1970s and studied intermittently ever since, that is a striking absence, and it is the single most important thing to understand about it. The discovery itself explains both the name and the ambiguity. Schoenenberger and Monnier's group induced sleep in rabbits by electrical stimulation of the thalamus, collected cerebral venous blood, and isolated a nonapeptide fraction that appeared to transfer the sleep effect to recipient animals. The compound was named for the observation — a factor from the blood of sleeping animals that induced delta-wave sleep — not for any understanding of how it worked. Naming a molecule after an assay result is normal at the discovery stage; what is unusual is that half a century later the name is still the main claim. Several mechanistic proposals have circulated without being established: modulation of GABAergic transmission, interaction with opioid systems, effects on somatostatin and corticotropin release, and a general role as a neuromodulator rather than a classical ligand. None has produced a receptor. A related complication is that much of the older literature measured 'DSIP-like immunoreactivity' in tissue and plasma using antibodies whose specificity was never firmly established, so a body of work describing where DSIP is found may partly be describing something else. What can be said is that the peptide is small, unstable in circulation, and crosses into brain tissue poorly compared with compounds designed for the purpose. Any account of how a subcutaneous administration would produce a sleep effect hours later has to bridge those facts, and none of the available accounts does.

Researched effects

The reported human effects come from a small cluster of trials, nearly all published between 1981 and 1992, and reading them in sequence is more informative than any summary of them. The first human work came from Schneider-Helmert and colleagues. A 1981 study in six normal volunteers used a double-blind crossover design (Int J Clin Pharmacol Ther Toxicol; PMID 6895513), and a companion 1981 report in six chronic insomniacs used acute intravenous administration at 25 nmol/kg, describing longer sleep duration and higher subjective sleep quality (Experientia; PMID 7028502). A brief Lancet report the same year (PMID 6112579) put the insomnia finding in front of a clinical audience. Monti and colleagues followed in 1987 with a polysomnographic study reporting increased total sleep and NREM sleep (Int J Clin Pharmacol Res; PMID 3583493), and Schneider-Helmert reported on intermediate-term effects on 24-hour sleep-wake behaviour the same year (Eur Neurol; PMID 3622582). The most substantial later trial is Bes et al. 1992, a double-blind study in 16 chronic insomniacs (Neuropsychobiology; PMID 1299794). Outside sleep, two applications were tested. Backmund et al. 1998 examined DSIP in opioid detoxification (J Clin Psychopharmacol; PMID 9617990), and Pomfrett et al. 2009 looked at it as an anaesthesia adjunct (Eur J Anaesthesiol; PMID 19142086) — the only study in the group from the past twenty-five years. Three features of that record matter more than the individual results. The trials are small, typically six to sixteen participants. They cluster around a single research tradition, so the finding has not been reproduced independently at scale. And the sleep literature effectively stops in the early 1990s — not because the question was settled, but because the field moved on without resolving it. A compound with a genuine, reproducible hypnotic effect and no receptor to patent would still have attracted follow-up; the silence is itself evidence about effect size.

Dosage — reported ranges (overview)

Two sets of numbers circulate and they are not versions of each other. The trial figure is about 25 nmol/kg intravenously, used in the early Schneider-Helmert work. Because DSIP has a molecular weight near 850 daltons, 25 nmol/kg works out to roughly 21 mcg/kg, or something on the order of 1.5 mg for a 70 kg adult — delivered into a vein, in a sleep laboratory, with EEG recording. That is a substantially larger amount than the community figures, by a different route, in a setting that no home use resembles. Community and vendor sources describe roughly 100-250 mcg subcutaneously, typically 30-60 minutes before bed, sometimes on a cycled schedule. Those figures are not scaled from the trial protocol and are not supported by pharmacokinetic reasoning; where their provenance can be traced at all, it leads to other community sources. They are recorded here because they are what people will encounter, and because the arithmetic below is more useful when it is anchored to figures readers recognise. The reconstitution table uses 100 mcg and 250 mcg as reference points for that reason alone. No dose, route or frequency is being recommended, and the gap between the trial protocol and the community pattern is itself one of the more informative facts about this compound.

A printable protocol sheet with a reconstitution reference and an injection log comes with All-Access Lifetime.

Reconstitution — bac-water math

DSIP ships lyophilized and is reconstituted with bacteriostatic water. Concentration in mcg per unit = total mcg in the vial / (mL of bacteriostatic water x 100), since a U-100 insulin syringe holds 1 mL across 100 units. Worked example for a 5 mg (5,000 mcg) vial at the community-reported reference amounts:

This is concentration math, not a dose recommendation.

Injection / administration basics

The route in the evidence base and the route in general discussion are different, and for this compound the difference is unusually consequential. Every published human DSIP trial used intravenous administration, which delivers the full amount into circulation at once — relevant for a peptide whose reported plasma half-life is a matter of minutes. Community sources describe subcutaneous injection before bed, which is slower to absorb and has never been characterised for DSIP in any published study. General handling concepts — sterile technique, site rotation, recomputing concentration whenever the vial size changes, and working from your own label rather than a figure quoted for someone else's vial — are covered here as general information. The detailed workflow comes with All-Access Lifetime, which includes the printable protocol sheet and injection log for every compound. This is general educational information, not a personal administration protocol; a qualified professional should guide any actual use.

Half-life & frequency rationale

Early intravenous human work reported a plasma half-life on the order of 7-15 minutes, with in vitro degradation studies describing a similar few-minute range. Either figure makes DSIP one of the shorter-lived compounds discussed in this library. That number deserves more attention than it usually gets, because it sits awkwardly against what the compound is expected to do. A substance cleared within roughly a quarter of an hour is not present in circulation for the seven or eight hours of a night's sleep. Any account of a night-long effect therefore requires something other than sustained blood levels — a trigger effect on a sleep-initiating process, a metabolite, or an action at a site the peptide reaches briefly and influences durably. None of those has been demonstrated, and the absence of a known receptor makes each of them difficult to test. The alternative reading is that the reported effects are small, largely subjective, and concentrated at sleep onset rather than across the night, which would be consistent with both the pharmacokinetics and the modest and inconsistent trial results. This page cannot settle which reading is right. It can point out that the half-life is a fact the enthusiastic accounts of this compound generally do not engage with.

Stacking — overview

DSIP is frequently discussed alongside Selank and Semax as a sleep-and-stress combination in research communities, on the basis of each compound's individually reported profile rather than any study of the three together. It is worth being explicit that no published research has examined DSIP in combination with anything. Each combination is covered in depth — the mechanism-level rationale, what is reported in practice, and combination-specific cautions — in the paid DSIP Stacking Module included with this guide.

For how combinations are grouped by research context, the named blends, and why a pre-mixed blend vial cannot be calculated from its total milligrams, see the peptide stacks guide.

Storage & handling

• Lyophilized (unmixed): store cold; long-term typically -20 C / freezer; stable refrigerated short-term.
• Reconstituted: refrigerate (~2-8 C); commonly reported usable window ~2-4 weeks; keep away from light; do not freeze once mixed.

Evidence File

The DSIP Evidence File

The free guide reads eight human papers and calls the evidence weak and contested. This module rebuilds the human record from live PubMed searching and finds it far larger than eight papers, spanning indications the free guide does not cover and running later than the free guide says it does. It names every registry query behind the absence claim so the check can be repeated, traces five widely quoted DSIP figures back to the sentence each came from, and sets the published protocols beside the community one parameter by parameter. Several of the corrections run against the compound and several run in its favour.

• 19 further human records located, none of them on the free page
• 16 registry queries, including under the INN, all returning zero
• 1 modern human study instrumented a brain while DSIP circulated
• 5 circulating figures traced to the sentence each came from

Sourcing File

The DSIP Sourcing File

Generic peptide certificate advice does not fit this molecule, and following it produces a confident reading of a document that has not answered the question. DSIP has one basic residue and three acidic ones, which changes the mass spectrum, the counterion arithmetic, the solubility behaviour and the tests that are worth requiring. It also has exactly one aromatic residue, and the consequence of that fact for the commonest purity assay is the most important sourcing point in this file. The module ends with a constructed certificate read line by line.

• 1 chromophore, and the named major degradant does not have it
• 15 mDa separates a synthesis fault from a storage fault
• 1 basic site caps the TFA burden near 11.8 percent by mass
• 848.8, 848.33 and 849.34 all belong on a certificate, differently

Benefit & Outcome Review

The DSIP Benefit and Outcome Review

Eleven claims circulate commercially for this peptide and each is taken here on its own terms. For every one the review states the species the measurement was made in, the design that produced it, what the comparator was, whether an effect size exists at all, and what the authors themselves concluded. Human, animal and in-vitro results are kept in separate blocks and never merged into a single verdict sentence. Several claims turn out to have been tested directly rather than merely left unstudied, and the distinction between untested and tested-and-failed changes what each grade can honestly say.

• 11 claims graded; 1 tested in humans against a positive control
• 3 placebo-controlled sleep trials, and the split runs by authorship
• 0 of 4 community protocol parameters have a published basis
• 107 and 67 patient withdrawal series, no control group in either

Guide FAQ

Quick answers about guide scope, access, and educational use context.