The pages that rank for MOTS-c dosage hand out four different answers. Not one of them can point to a human study that gave a person that number. No dose of MOTS-c has been established in humans: no approved product, no label, no regulator-reviewed regimen. One registered trial gives MOTS-c to people as a treatment. It began in February 2026, plans for 120 adults, and its public record describes the regimen as “fixed dose once daily for 12 weeks.” No milligrams.
That gap is the most useful fact available about this peptide. Everything below follows from it.
MOTS-c Dosage: What The Registry Says
The trial is NCT07505745, first posted on ClinicalTrials.gov on 1 April 2026 and last updated the same day. Hudson Biotech sponsors it. The site sits in China. The design is a Phase 2a, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group study in adults with prediabetes and overweight or obesity, one-to-one allocation, quadruple masked, with the randomization code held by an unblinded pharmacist until database lock.
Two primary outcomes. Change from baseline in insulin sensitivity measured by the Matsuda Index over an oral glucose tolerance test at 12 weeks. Incidence of treatment-emergent adverse events through 16 weeks.
Secondary outcomes include HbA1c, fasting glucose, two-hour plasma glucose during a 75 g OGTT, and anti-drug antibodies.
Then the intervention column. Route: subcutaneous injection. Regimen: “Fixed dose once daily for 12 weeks.”
A sponsor that believes in a molecule, a masked randomized design, a hundred and twenty adults, and a public record that declines to print the number. That is what a dose looks like before it exists.
The registry returns five studies for MOTS-c. Four of them measure MOTS-c levels in blood as a marker. One of them gives it to people as a drug. This is the one.
The Mouse Dose, And Why The Charts Skip It
The discovery paper carries a date. Lee and colleagues published in Cell Metabolism on 3 March 2015: a 16-amino-acid peptide translated from a short open reading frame inside the mitochondrial 12S rRNA, with skeletal muscle as its apparent primary target, acting through inhibition of the folate cycle and the tethered de novo purine pathway, which activates AMPK. In mice, treatment prevented age-dependent and high-fat-diet-induced insulin resistance, plus diet-induced obesity.
Six years later, Reynolds and colleagues put numbers on the dosing in Nature Communications on 20 January 2021. Young CD-1 mice received 5 or 15 mg/kg per day by intraperitoneal injection for two weeks. Middle-aged mice at 12 months and old mice at 22 months received 15 mg/kg per day for two weeks before treadmill testing. A late-life group started intermittent treatment at roughly 23.5 months, three times per week, at 15 mg/kg per day, and gained physical capacity and healthspan.
Read those units again. Milligrams per kilogram of mouse, delivered into the peritoneal cavity, daily for a fortnight, under an animal ethics protocol.
The charts sell a flat 5 mg or 10 mg per injection, or 2.5 mg to 10 mg with a titration over four weeks. One chart says once per five days. Another says three to five times a week. A third says once daily. The published animal work offers none of those schedules, and no published study supplies the human equivalent of any of them.
The Human Experiment That Went The Other Way
Here is the part the chart-makers leave out.
Ramanjaneya and colleagues ran a human study, published in Clinical Endocrinology in August 2019. They infused a lipid emulsion into healthy women and into women with polycystic ovary syndrome, then ran a hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp. Plasma MOTS-c rose to 232 plus or minus 124 percent of basal in controls and 349 plus or minus 206 percent in the PCOS group. Insulin blunted that rise. Good data, and it establishes that circulating MOTS-c responds to fuel and to insulin in people.
Then they repeated the protocol after eight weeks of moderate exercise training. Circulating MOTS-c did not change in the healthy controls or in the women with PCOS.
The sales pitch for this peptide is that it works like exercise in a vial. The one human intervention that tested exercise against circulating MOTS-c found no change after two months of training. That finding sits in the same literature as the 2021 mouse paper noting that exercise induces endogenous MOTS-c expression in human skeletal muscle and in circulation. Both results stand. One measured expression after exercise; the other measured plasma after a training program. The difference is worth understanding before anyone sells you a schedule.
Human measurement studies do not run in one direction either. Filibeli and colleagues reported on 7 April 2026 in Archives of Endocrinology and Metabolism: 121 adolescents with PCOS against 125 controls, mean serum MOTS-c higher in the PCOS group at p = 0.059, and no significant association with any anthropometric or metabolic parameter. Close, and not there.
What A MOTS-c Dosage Would Have To Prove
Four things, in order.
- A dose that produces a measurable blood level in people. That number is unpublished.
- A dose that moves an outcome that matters: insulin sensitivity, HbA1c, glucose. NCT07505745 will report on that, and not before its estimated primary completion in February 2027.
- A safety count. Treatment-emergent adverse events are a primary outcome of that trial, which means the rate is unknown, which means the honest answer to “is this safe at 5 mg” is a count that does not appear in print.
- A product a regulator has reviewed. DailyMed, the National Library of Medicine label database, returned zero records for MOTS-c on 21 October 2026. No approved product, so no label, so no approved dose, no approved indication, and no contraindication list.
A clinic selling vials today runs none of those four steps. No protocol filed, no consent form, no adverse-event table submitted anywhere. A trial participant gets unblinded monitoring and a database lock. A customer gets a vial and a chart from a website.
That is the cost of the gap, and somebody pays it in cash.
One more distinction that matters. A compounded MOTS-c product is not an FDA-approved drug, and it is not the material in these trials. The vials and the research vials share a name and a sequence. They do not share a manufacturer, a sterility file, or a batch record you can read.
Frequently asked questions
Is there an established MOTS-c dosage?
No. No regulator has approved a MOTS-c product, so no label sets a dose. The one registered trial giving it to people describes its regimen as a fixed dose once daily for 12 weeks and leaves the milligrams out of the public record.
What dose does the human trial use?
The public record for NCT07505745 does not state it. The entry lists a subcutaneous route and a fixed once-daily regimen for 12 weeks, and omits the amount.
Does exercise raise MOTS-c in humans?
Two published studies point in different directions. The 2021 Nature Communications paper reports that exercise induces MOTS-c expression in human skeletal muscle and circulation. The 2019 Clinical Endocrinology study found that eight weeks of moderate exercise training did not change circulating MOTS-c in healthy women or in women with PCOS.
Is MOTS-c FDA approved?
No. A DailyMed search on 21 October 2026 returned zero label records for the peptide. No approved product, no approved indication, and no approved dose.
Can a peptide clinic sell MOTS-c?
That question is separate from whether a dose exists, and it turns on state pharmacy law and the federal compounding rules for each specific product. Ask the clinic for the source pharmacy, the certificate of analysis, and the name of the prescriber who signs the order. A clinic that cannot produce all three is selling a research chemical with a payment page.
Is a 5 mg MOTS-c dose safe?
The rate of treatment-emergent adverse events is a primary outcome of the running trial, so it has not entered the literature. Any page that states a safety profile in milligrams is inventing one.
Sources: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT07505745, first posted 1 April 2026 | Lee C et al., Cell Metabolism, 3 March 2015 | Reynolds JC et al., Nature Communications, 20 January 2021 | Ramanjaneya M et al., Clinical Endocrinology, August 2019 | Filibeli BE et al., Archives of Endocrinology and Metabolism, 7 April 2026 | DailyMed label search, queried 21 October 2026