Melanotan 1 Dosage Guide 2026: Clinical Trials vs Reported Use

The calculator

Four inputs, three outputs, no opinion anywhere in it: type in the strength printed on the vial, the water volume, the syringe scale and a milligram figure, and it returns the concentration, the draw volume and the unit count for that one combination.

Melanotan 1 dosage chart: every published human figure

One row per source, with the physical form printed beside it: every melanotan 1 amount we could trace to a named document, with the form it was given in and the route next to it. No tier column appears below and no starting row, because the record holds nothing that would justify either.

Read the form column before the milligram column: the approved product is a solid rod that releases over weeks, and the research injections were a solution pushed in all at once. Sixteen milligrams in the first case and sixteen milligrams in the second are not the same exposure, and no source on this page converts one into the other.

One compound, several spellings: melanotan 1, melanotan-1, melanotan I, MT-1, MT-I, NDP-MSH and afamelanotide all point at the same 13-amino-acid peptide, and everything below applies to all of them.

The conversion we are not doing: an implant milligram is not an injected milligram, and a per-kilogram injected figure is not a fixed daily figure. No document listed above carries one across into the other, so any chart that hands you a single flat number for melanotan 1 has added a step the sources did not.

The conversion we are doing: milligrams into syringe units, further down. That step is pure division, and it stays true whatever the milligram figure is and whoever put it in front of you.

What is the approved melanotan 1 dose?

A 16mg implant, every two months: the US prescribing information states it in one line, that a single implant is inserted "subcutaneously above the anterior supra-iliac crest every 2 months". Each implant holds 16mg of afamelanotide, equivalent to 18mg of afamelanotide acetate, in 15.3 to 19.5mg of poly (DL-lactide-co-glycolide).

Who is allowed to place it: the same section restricts administration to a healthcare professional "who is proficient in the subcutaneous implantation procedure and has completed training prior to administration". The EU summary says the same thing a different way, that the medicine is prescribed by specialist doctors in centers treating erythropoietic protoporphyria and used only by doctors who have been trained.

What the thing physically is: a solid white to off-white bioresorbable sterile rod, approximately 1.7cm long and 1.45mm across. The label adds that it resorbs and "may not be able to be located from 10 days after insertion", which is a sentence about a rod, not about a syringe.

The ceiling the EU record prints and the US one does not: the European public summary states that three implants a year are recommended and "the maximum number is 4", timed before and during periods of high sunlight exposure, with patients observed for allergic reactions for 30 minutes after each one.

What it is approved for, which is not tanning: both records give one indication, erythropoietic protoporphyria. The US label describes a melanocortin 1 receptor agonist "indicated to increase pain free light exposure in adult patients with a history of phototoxic reactions from erythropoietic protoporphyria (EPP)". The European Commission granted the marketing authorization on 22 December 2014, under exceptional circumstances, and the original US application was approved on 8 October 2019.

Why the release curve, not the milligram figure, is the real dose: the label reports a median time to peak of 36 hours, a peak concentration of 3.7 plus or minus 1.3 ng/mL, and a half-life of about 15 hours from the controlled release implant. Sixteen milligrams released over weeks and sixteen milligrams pushed through a needle at once produce different curves, and only the first has an approval attached to it. What trial documents specify about route and site more generally is set out on the subcutaneous versus intramuscular page.

What dose did the injection studies use?

One number, and two papers that go below it: 0.16mg per kilogram is the amount used by Dorr 2000, by Barnetson 2006 and by the second and third of the three studies in Dorr 2004. Ugwu 1997 ran a band from 0.08 to 0.21 around it, and the first study in Dorr 2004 sat at 0.08 before the same group raised it.

Dorr 2000, seven volunteers: skin types III or IV, "10 daily subcutaneous injections" of the compound the paper itself calls Melanotan-I, at 0.16mg per kilogram per day, Monday to Friday over two weeks. Forearm skin showed a mean 98% increase in eumelanin against baseline, with pheomelanin unchanged.

Barnetson 2006, sixty-five subjects: the largest of the injection studies here, at the same 0.16mg per kilogram, into the abdomen, for three 10-day cycles over three months. Melanin density rose 41% in the low minimal erythemal dose group and 12% in the high one, and thymine dimer formation in the epidermal basal layer fell 59%.

Ugwu 1997, three volunteers and the only injected pharmacokinetics: subcutaneous amounts from 0.08 to 0.21mg per kilogram in a randomized crossover against 0.16mg per kilogram intravenously and orally. The subcutaneous route showed complete bioavailability against the intravenous dose. The oral arm produced no detectable plasma levels at all.

Dorr 2004, three phase 1 studies at two amounts: the same Arizona group that ran Dorr 2000 published three combined light-exposure studies in one paper. The first randomized 8 subjects, 4 to 0.08mg per kilogram per day subcutaneously and 4 to saline, for 10 days before neck irradiation at three times the minimal erythemal dose, and reports tanning in 3 of the 4 on drug and 47% fewer sunburn cells at the irradiated site. The second raised the amount to 0.16mg per kilogram per day for 10 days in 12 subjects, all on drug, and reports that "More skin sites darkened with the higher dose". The third randomized 8 subjects to sunlight alone or sunlight plus 0.16mg per kilogram, 5 days a week for 4 weeks.

Levine 1991, the earliest of the five: 28 healthy men, "10 subcutaneous injections of either a purified NDP preparation or saline over 12 days", followed for seven weeks, with skin darkening measured by serial chromaticity. The published abstract records the schedule and the design and never prints the amount, which is why this row of the chart above carries no figure.

What the record has instead of a dose-ranging study: two amounts, not a curve. The escalation in Dorr 2004 runs between its studies rather than inside one, from 0.08 to 0.16mg per kilogram, and those two studies irradiated a different site at a different UV dose, so the comparison they support is loose. Ugwu moved across 0.08 to 0.21 in three people to measure pharmacokinetics rather than to find a dose. Nobody randomized one group of people to two injected amounts and compared them. What exists is two points measured under different conditions, and 0.16 is where the group stopped rather than where anything showed it should stop.

What is 0.16mg per kilogram in milligrams?

A per-kilogram figure is not a dose until a body weight is supplied: multiplying 0.16 by body weight in kilograms is the whole operation, and it is the step that turns a research figure into something with the same units as a vial.

The line that surprises people: at 70kg the published research amount is 11.2mg a day, which is more than an entire 10mg vial. Ten days of that is 112mg, or eleven and a fifth vials for one cycle.

The coincidence worth naming so nobody builds on it: at exactly 100kg the arithmetic lands on 16mg, the same digits as the approved implant. That is two unrelated numbers colliding. One is a solid rod releasing over two months, the other is a daily bolus, and nothing in the sources treats them as interchangeable.

The total-exposure comparison, with the caveat attached: the EU record recommends three implants a year, which is 48mg of afamelanotide across twelve months, with four implants and 64mg as the ceiling. A single 10-day injection cycle at 70kg is 112mg. The two numbers are not comparable as exposures, because the release profiles differ, but the size of the gap is the point.

How often was it given, and how long did a course run?

The approved rhythm: one implant every two months, three a year recommended in the EU and four the stated maximum, timed before and during periods of high sunlight exposure.

The trial rhythms: the two trials in Langendonk 2015 gave an implant every 60 days, five of them in the European study and three in the US one. The vitiligo trial gave 16mg monthly for four months, starting after a month of narrowband UV-B.

The injection rhythms: ten injections over twelve days (Levine 1991), ten doses Monday to Friday across two weeks (Dorr 2000), and three 10-day cycles spread over three months (Barnetson 2006). That last one is the only published melanotan 1 schedule with an explicit off period built into it, and the gaps between its cycles are the closest thing the record has to a cycling protocol.

How long the effect outlasted the course: Ugwu 1997 reports visible tanning peaking about a week after dosing stopped and persisting for three weeks. Levine 1991 puts peak darkening at one to three weeks after therapy was completed. Both are observations about pigment, not about how long the peptide stays in circulation, which the same pharmacokinetic paper puts at a beta-phase half-life of 0.8 to 1.7 hours.

What no source describes: a washout, a break, or a second block after a first, for the injected form outside the Barnetson cycle structure. A melanotan 1 cycle with a defined off phase is a convention, not a published protocol.

Do melanotan 1 and melanotan 2 dose the same way?

No, and the two differ in shape, in size and by a factor of sixteen in the amount tested: conflating them is the error that matters here, because the human data on each belongs to a different molecule and does not transfer.

The side effect that belongs to the second column and not the first: the 1996 pilot reports mild nausea at most dose levels, and "a stretching and yawning complex appeared to correlate with the onset of spontaneous, penile erections". That observation is about the cyclic molecule at 0.01mg per kilogram, and reprinting it under a melanotan 1 heading attributes a finding to a compound that did not produce it.

Everything past the numbers is a separate question: the structural, regulatory and case-report differences between the two are worked through on the melanotan 1 versus melanotan 2 page, which is where that comparison belongs. The same approved-versus-loosely-sold split runs through the rest of this peptide family, and the PT-141 page covers what the Vyleesi approval actually includes.

Where do microgram-per-day melanotan 1 figures come from?

Not from any of the papers on this page, and the arithmetic settles it: the 0.16mg per kilogram figure comes to 11.2mg a day at 70kg. A figure of 500mcg a day is about one twenty-second of that. A figure of 1mg a day is about one eleventh.

What that gap does and does not prove: it does not prove a smaller amount does nothing, because the smallest amount anyone injected in a published study is 0.08mg per kilogram, which is 5.6mg a day at 70kg and still eleven times a 500mcg figure. It proves only that a hundreds-of-micrograms figure was not derived from Dorr 2000, Dorr 2004, Barnetson, Ugwu or Levine, because dividing any of their numbers down to it is not a step any of them describe.

No figure on this page is offered as yours, and the only injected human figure that exists is a per-kilogram number from studies of three, seven, twenty-eight and sixty-five people.

Melanotan 1 reconstitution by vial size: 5mg, 10mg and 20mg

First, the part everything else depends on: the approved product is a solid implant and is never reconstituted, so nothing in the eleven sources below reconstituted a melanotan 1 vial. There is no tested water volume to report, because no study on this page ever mixed one.

So the table does the only thing that can be done honestly: it runs the arithmetic for the vial sizes that turn up in listings, at the water volumes those listings assume, and shows what one syringe unit is worth in each case. The milligram column uses 1mg throughout, not as a suggested amount but because it divides cleanly. For any other vial and any other water volume, the same division is laid out in concentration versus dose and run for you by the reconstitution calculator.

What a larger water volume changes, and what it leaves alone: the same milligram figure spreads across more unit gradations, so a misread of one unit shifts it by proportionally less. The cost is a bigger volume in the barrel for the same amount of peptide. The peptide in the glass never moves: ten milligrams is ten milligrams at 1mL and at 2.5mL.

The consequence for the published research figure: 11.2mg on a 10mg vial in 2mL, which is 5mg per mL, comes to 2.24mL. That is more than two full 1mL barrels, and more than the vial holds. It is a useful sanity check on any chart that presents the research amount as something an insulin syringe delivers in one go.

How many units is 1mg of melanotan 1?

A fourfold spread across three ordinary mixes: on a 10mg vial in 1mL, which is 10mg per mL, 1mg reads as 10 units on a U-100 syringe. The same vial in 2mL reads 20 units. A 5mg vial in 2mL reads 40 units.

Why the syringe cannot answer the question on its own: the heading asks about milligrams and the barrel answers in volume, so the number that reconciles them is the concentration, and the concentration was set by whoever chose the water volume. A U-100 barrel reads 100 units to the milliliter, so one unit is a hundredth of a milliliter, and what that hundredth carries in milligrams changes with every mix.

One number every row above quietly assumes: the counts here are U-100 counts. Pulled on the other scale in circulation, each one delivers two and a half times the volume it was worked out for, and that multiplier sits on top of whichever concentration row applies rather than replacing it. The two syringe scales have their own page.

What's not known yet?

Not approved for tanning, in either record: the US and EU indications both name erythropoietic protoporphyria and nothing else. Cosmetic pigmentation is what the injection studies measured, and it is not what either regulator here has approved a product for.

No modern dose-finding for the injected form: the 0.16mg per kilogram figure was settled in the 1990s and reused, and the largest injection study in this source pack enrolled 65 people. The only published escalation is the one inside Dorr 2004, 0.08 to 0.16mg per kilogram across two of its three studies, which is two points and not a curve. No paper here reports a ceiling or a minimum effective amount.

No pharmacokinetics for a reconstituted vial: the only injected pharmacokinetic data in this source pack is Ugwu 1997, on a purified preparation made for a clinical study. The other pharmacokinetic numbers on this page come from the implant, which releases on its own schedule.

Long-term safety is formally open even for the approved product: the EU authorization was granted under exceptional circumstances precisely because complete information could not be obtained, with a patient registry imposed to supply longer-term data. The label's answer to the same gap is a twice-yearly full body skin examination.

Three holes, and none of them is small:

• No dose-response curve for injected melanotan 1. Two amounts have been injected in humans, 0.08 and 0.16mg per kilogram, in different studies under different light exposure, and 0.08 at 70kg is still 5.6mg a day. Nothing in the hundreds of micrograms has been tested at all.
• No controlled cosmetic safety data. The mole and pigment signals sit in a 4% versus 2% label table and in four case reports, which is a signal worth watching and not a measurement.
• No identity, purity or strength verification for a vial bought loose. The 2017 review names product quality as one of its three concerns and there is no independent check behind a label.

Any figure that closes those three gaps was supplied by whoever printed it, not by a study.

Which makes it a vial question before it is a dose question: every unit count in the tables above assumes the strength printed on the glass is true, and it is that assumption, not the arithmetic, we would lose sleep over. What trial records specify about where an injection goes is collected on the injection sites page.

How this page is sourced

Read off the labels and the papers themselves: every figure on this page was taken from the cited document, never from somebody else's summary of it. Abstracts, label sections and the three regulator records were read on 2 August 2026.

Twelve sources, and only four of them supply an injected human amount: three regulator records and nine peer-reviewed papers, one of which is a review and one of which reports the other molecule so the comparison is not made from memory. Each is listed below with its identifier, and every figure on this page traces back to one of them.

How the absence claims here were searched, because an absence claim is a claim about a whole literature: on 2 August 2026 we searched PubMed across all fields for melanotan-I OR afamelanotide OR "Nle4-D-Phe7", then searched for Levine N[Author] AND melanotan, which returns 8 records, and for Nle4-D-Phe7 alpha-MSH AND tanning, which returns 9 records. That is the search that turned up Dorr 2004, and an earlier version of this page missed it and printed that no published escalation existed. The correction is recorded here rather than quietly swapped in.

What we still could not find, stated plainly: no study that randomized one group of people to two injected amounts and compared them, no pharmacokinetics for a reconstituted vial, and no published human amount expressed in micrograms per day. Those are absences we searched for and did not close, not claims that they cannot exist.

Where the rules behind that live: our sourcing and citation-verification standard sits on the methodology page. Any number here that ever needs correcting gets corrected there first.

Last reviewed: 2 August 2026.

1. 1

   SCENESSE (afamelanotide) implant, for subcutaneous use. US prescribing information, DailyMed, set id 94f53286-11dd-7fbb-e053-2a95a90a7c48. Source for the 16mg implant strength, the every-2-months interval, the anterior supra-iliac crest site, the training requirement, the rod dimensions, the amino acid sequence, the pharmacokinetic figures, the twice-yearly skin examination and the adverse reaction table. Read 2 August 2026. dailymed.nlm.nih.gov.

2. 2

   US Food and Drug Administration. Drugs@FDA record for NDA 210797, SCENESSE, afamelanotide 16mg implant, subcutaneous, prescription. Original application approved 8 October 2019; most recent supplement 12 August 2024. Retrieved through the openFDA drug application endpoint on 2 August 2026. api.fda.gov, Drugs@FDA endpoint.

3. 3

   European Medicines Agency. Scenesse: EPAR summary for the public, EMA/668463/2014, EMEA/H/C/002548. Source for the every-2-months interval, "Three implants per year are recommended; the maximum number is 4", the 30-minute observation, the specialist-center restriction, the orphan designation of 8 May 2008, the exceptional-circumstances basis and the marketing authorization date of 22 December 2014. Read 2 August 2026. ema.europa.eu, EPAR summary.

4. 4

   Langendonk JG, Balwani M, Anderson KE, et al. Afamelanotide for erythropoietic protoporphyria. N Engl J Med. 2015;373(1):48-59. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa1411481. PMID 26132941.

5. 5

   Levine N, Sheftel SN, Eytan T, et al. Induction of skin tanning by subcutaneous administration of a potent synthetic melanotropin. JAMA. 1991;266(19):2730-2736. Abstract read for the 28-subject design and the 10 injections over 12 days; it publishes no milligram amount. PMID 1658407.

6. 6

   Ugwu SO, Blanchard J, Dorr RT, et al. Skin pigmentation and pharmacokinetics of melanotan-I in humans. Biopharm Drug Dispos. 1997;18(3):259-269. Source for the 0.08 to 0.21mg per kg subcutaneous range, the complete subcutaneous bioavailability, the undetectable oral levels and the beta-phase half-life of 0.8 to 1.7 hours. PMID 9113347.

7. 7

   Dorr RT, Dvorakova K, Brooks C, et al. Increased eumelanin expression and tanning is induced by a superpotent melanotropin [Nle4-D-Phe7]-alpha-MSH in humans. Photochem Photobiol. 2000;72(4):526-532. Source for the seven volunteers, the 0.16mg per kg per day Monday-to-Friday schedule and the 98% forearm eumelanin increase. PMID 11045725.

8. 8

   Barnetson RS, Ooi TK, Zhuang L, et al. [Nle4-D-Phe7]-alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone significantly increased pigmentation and decreased UV damage in fair-skinned Caucasian volunteers. J Invest Dermatol. 2006;126(8):1869-1878. doi:10.1038/sj.jid.5700317. PMID 16763547.

9. 9

   Dorr RT, Ertl G, Levine N, et al. Effects of a superpotent melanotropic peptide in combination with solar UV radiation on tanning of the skin in human volunteers. Arch Dermatol. 2004;140(7):827-835. Source for the 0.08mg per kg per day first study, the increase to 0.16mg per kg per day in the second, the 4-on-drug and 4-on-saline split, the 3 of 4 tanning result and the 47% reduction in sunburn cells. doi:10.1001/archderm.140.7.827. PMID 15262693.

10. 10

    Lim HW, Grimes PE, Agbai O, et al. Afamelanotide and narrowband UV-B phototherapy for the treatment of vitiligo: a randomized multicenter trial. JAMA Dermatol. 2015;151(1):42-50. doi:10.1001/jamadermatol.2014.1875. PMID 25230094.

11. 11

    Dorr RT, Lines R, Levine N, et al. Evaluation of melanotan-II, a superpotent cyclic melanotropic peptide in a pilot phase-I clinical study. Life Sci. 1996;58(20):1777-1784. Cited only for the melanotan 2 structure, the 0.01mg per kg starting dose and the reported side effects, so the two compounds are separated from a source rather than from memory. doi:10.1016/0024-3205(96)00160-9. PMID 8637402.

12. 12

    Habbema L, Halk AB, Neumann M, Bergman W. Risks of unregulated use of alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone analogues: a review. Int J Dermatol. 2017;56:975-980. Source for the four melanoma case reports, the dysplastic nevi observation, the quality and dosing concerns and the statement that causal evidence is not conclusive. doi:10.1111/ijd.13585. PMID 28266027.