Melanotan 2 Dosage Guide 2026: Trials vs Reported Use

The calculator

Five things go in, three come back: the vial size, the volume of water added, the syringe type, the barrel size and a milligram figure are the inputs; the concentration, the matching volume and the reading in syringe units are what the tool returns.

Melanotan 2 dosage chart: every human figure we traced, with its source

One row per amount we traced, with the population beside it: every Melanotan II figure below comes from a named study or a published case report, with the people it applied to printed beside it. There is no beginner row and no maintenance row, because the record carries neither. The claim in that heading is bounded on purpose: it is every figure this page could trace to a document, not a claim that no other exists.

Read the second column before anything else: five of the eleven rows give milligrams per kilogram of body weight rather than flat milligrams, so none of those five is a number anyone could copy off a chart. Five of the six flat figures come from case reports of people who injected themselves, and each of those five was written up because of what happened next. The sixth was given inside a cancer regimen alongside SM-88, melanin, phenytoin and sirolimus, which is not a Melanotan II amount anybody chose for what Melanotan II does.

One peptide, several spellings: the same molecule is written Melanotan 2, Melanotan II, MT-II, MT2 and melanotan-2 across search boxes, forum threads and vendor listings. The trial literature uses Melanotan II, and everything here applies to all of those spellings. It is a different peptide from Melanotan 1, and the two are separated on our Melanotan 1 versus 2 page rather than here.

The conversion this page will not perform: turning a per-kilogram trial figure into a flat milligram schedule for a stranger. The arithmetic of per-kilogram to milligrams is in the next section, worked at six body weights, so the shape of it is visible without any of those numbers being handed to anyone as a target.

The conversion this page will perform: milligrams into syringe units, further down. That one is division, and it holds whatever the milligram figure is and wherever it came from.

What does 0.025mg per kilogram work out to in milligrams?

A per-kilogram figure is not a dose, it is a rule for making one: the same 0.025mg per kg produces a different milligram amount for every body mass it is applied to, which is why a chart that prints a flat milligram figure has already made a decision the trial did not.

So here is the multiplication, and nothing else: body weight in kilograms times the per-kilogram figure. The 1996 escalation started at 0.01mg per kg and stepped up in 0.005mg per kg increments, so it passed through five levels in all: 0.01, 0.015, 0.02, 0.025 and 0.03. The table runs three of them across six round weights, the floor, the ceiling and the one the paper singled out, because those are the three the paper itself puts a sentence around.

What the spread tells you: across the range above, the published levels land anywhere from 0.5mg to 3mg in a single injection. A chart that prints one milligram figure for everybody is compressing that whole table into a guess about the reader.

The other thing the table hides, and it matters more: the per-kilogram figures it multiplies out come from a three-person dose-escalation and two ten-person crossover studies, all of them in men, all of them monitored, and all of them closed by 2000. The arithmetic is exact. What it is arithmetic about is thin.

Three alpha-MSH analogues did reach an approved US label: bremelanotide, afamelanotide and setmelanotide, all three further down this page, and none of them this molecule. What a regulator was prepared to put in writing about a melanocortin agonist is worked through separately on our page on the Vyleesi approval.

How often was it given, and for how long?

The 1996 escalation, in the paper's own two descriptions: its methods say injections "were given daily (Monday-Friday) for 2 consecutive weeks" on a single-blind alternating-day design, saline one day and MT-II the next, and its conclusion describes the result as tanning activity in humans "given only 5 low doses every other day by subcutaneous injection". The alternating design is what reconciles the two sentences: ten weekday visits, five of them carrying peptide.

The two erectile-dysfunction studies measured single injections rather than courses: each injection in Wessells 1998 was followed by a 6-hour rigidity window in a crossover against vehicle, across a range from 0.025 to 0.157mg per kg, and the 2000 study gave drug and vehicle twice each in the same design. Neither one ran a course, so neither one produces a frequency.

No cycle, no off period and no maintenance phase appear in any trial of this peptide on its own. The longest exposure in those three is two weeks. One later trial did run longer, and it is not a Melanotan II schedule: the SM-88 first-in-human study gave 10 micrograms of Melanotan II alongside SM-88, melanin, phenytoin and sirolimus each morning on the first five days of each week for a six-week cycle, and let participants who tolerated it continue (Stega, 2020). Longer runs also exist as case reports of people dosing themselves: a 3 to 4 week course of self-injections in a 20-year-old woman later diagnosed with melanoma (Hjuler, 2014), and 64 days of self-administered injections in a patient followed for oral pigmentation (Bonchev, 2026). Neither of those was a schedule anyone designed, tested or supervised. They are records of what one person did, written down after a clinician saw the result.

And nothing registered extends it either: searched on 2 August 2026, ClinicalTrials.gov returns exactly one record for Melanotan, and that record is not a study anyone is running. Its own summary field opens "This example interventional study record describes", and it was posted by a commercial sponsor rather than published by the registry, so no schedule, no participant count and no amount in it means anything. Excluding it, there is no registered Melanotan II trial anywhere in that database.

Which route did the trials use?

Subcutaneous, in every trial we traced: the 1996 escalation and both erectile-dysfunction crossovers delivered MT-II by subcutaneous injection, the later cancer combination carried its Melanotan II component in a subcutaneous suspension (Stega, 2020), and the case report of systemic toxicity describes a subcutaneous injection as well. No trial we found used any other route for this peptide.

The nasal route exists on the market and in the case reports, but in no trial: a 2025 case report describes a 22-year-old woman who used a Melanotan II nasal spray for tanning and was diagnosed with a mucosal malignant melanoma of the anterior maxilla (Alsabbagh, 2025). The UK regulator addresses nasal sprays directly in its own correspondence, and it does so as a classification question rather than a dosing one.

Why route sits underneath the milligram question rather than beside it: the step from a milligram figure to an actual exposure runs through absorption, and absorption is set by the route rather than by the figure. A PubMed search pairing "melanotan ii" with pharmacokinetics, both as [Title/Abstract] terms, returned 1 record on 2 August 2026, and that record is a mouse imaging study of technetium-labeled analogues rather than a human pharmacokinetic study (Raposinho, 2008). There is no published human absorption curve to carry a figure from one route to another.

Where does Melanotan 2 stand with regulators?

United States, the compounding file: FDA's page on bulk drug substances that may present significant safety risks lists Melanotan II under substances "previously in category 2 of the interim policies" whose nominations "were withdrawn by the nominators", and it keeps printing the rationale the agency had identified: compounded drugs containing Melanotan II "may pose risk for immunogenicity for certain routes of administration due to the potential for aggregation or peptide-related impurities", and "Published case reports discuss serious adverse events including melanoma, posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome, sympathomimetic toxidrome and priapism". The page was current as of 22 April 2026 when we read it.

United States, the border: Import Alert 66-41, "Detention Without Physical Examination of Unapproved New Drugs Promoted In The U.S.", carries red-list entries naming melanotan peptides, and the entries do not all say the same thing. One is recorded simply as Melanotan II, and its note field reads only "China". Separate entries, the ones whose product description names both melanotan peptides together rather than this one alone, are what carry the note that the product "is imported as non-human research purposes only and then the unapproved new drug is sold on internet". Two facts, two different rows, and we had them joined into one until we went back and read the fields. The alert's published date read 31 July 2026 when we pulled it.

What the July 2026 advisory committee did not do: the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee met on 23 and 24 July 2026 to consider peptides for the 503A Bulks List, and Melanotan II was not among them. The published agenda names BPC-157, KPV, TB-500 and MOTs-C on the first day and emideltide, Semax and Epitalon on the second. Nothing about that meeting moved this peptide.

Three alpha-MSH analogues hold a US approval, and none is this one: bremelanotide, marketed as VYLEESI, a subcutaneous autoinjector under NDA 210557, originally approved on 21 June 2019; afamelanotide, marketed as SCENESSE, a 16mg implant under NDA 210797, originally approved on 8 October 2019; and setmelanotide, marketed as IMCIVREE, a subcutaneous solution under NDA 213793, whose original submission was approved on 25 November 2020 and whose label calls it "a melanocortin 4 (MC4) receptor agonist" and an eight amino acid cyclic peptide analogue of the endogenous melanocortin peptide alpha-MSH. A 2017 review, written before any of those US approvals landed, described afamelanotide as the only alpha-MSH analogue approved for use in a limited number of medical indications. Different molecules, different delivery, different indications, and together they are the comparison that makes the gap on Melanotan II visible: three neighbours of this peptide went through an application and came out with a label, and this one never entered.

Why that count says alpha-MSH analogues and not melanocortins: the melanocortin family is wider than the alpha-MSH branch, and its other branch has held US approvals for decades. The same FDA approvals database returns eight applications for corticotropin, among them the prescription ACTHAR GEL products under NDA 008372, whose label says the product "is also reported to bind to melanocortin receptors", and four for cosyntropin, among them prescription CORTROSYN under NDA 016750, whose label calls it "synthetic beta 1 - 24 corticotropin, a synthetic subunit of ACTH". Those two are labeled for infantile spasms, multiple sclerosis exacerbations and a list of rheumatic, dermatologic and allergic states in the first case, and for screening adrenocortical insufficiency in the second, so neither is a pigmentation or sexual-function drug and neither is the comparison worth making with this molecule. It is also why this page says analogues of alpha-MSH and does not claim a count of every approved melanocortin, a claim it made until 3 August 2026 and could not support.

United Kingdom: answering a freedom of information request in December 2021, the MHRA stated that between 2011 and 2021 it had received 13 suspected adverse drug reaction reports via the Yellow Card scheme associated with melanotan II, and that it has "repeatedly taken action to remove melanotan products so identified from sale for over 10 years". The same letter records a classification point that is easy to lose: the question turns on the medicinal-product definition rather than on the needle, so "injectable tanning products containing melanotan II are not automatically medicines", and where no medicinal claims are made, nasal tanning sprays "will not generally be regulated as medicinal products".

Australia: the TGA's consumer post of 24 January 2025 states that "Melanotan is not approved for sale or use as a tanning agent in Australia", that "It is illegal to supply tanning products containing melanotan without a doctor's prescription", and that "It is also illegal to advertise melanotan to the Australian public". It names headache, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite and facial redness as the common effects, the risk of serious skin cancers as the one it treats as most concerning, and, for Melanotan II specifically, "reports of increased moles and freckles, kidney dysfunction and swelling of the brain". A media release summarized on the same page, dated 21 May 2026, records 27 infringement notices totalling $101,412 issued to one individual over alleged unlawful supply.

What none of that gives you: a dose. Three regulators have written about this peptide and not one of them has written a label for it, which is the whole reason the newest rows in the chart above are case reports of what one person did rather than anything anyone set out to test.

Where do the internet dosing charts come from?

We are not going to describe pages we have not sampled. What follows on the right is what two peer-reviewed papers describe about this market, and on the left is what the trial record holds, so the gap between them is the finding rather than our opinion of anybody's website.

No figure on this page is offered as yours. Every per-kilogram figure comes from three trials that closed a quarter of a century ago, the one flat trial figure was given inside a cancer regimen of SM-88, melanin, phenytoin and sirolimus, and every other flat milligram figure we traced was written down by a doctor who was treating the person it came from.

The mechanical move worth naming: a per-kilogram amount measured under supervision, printed as a flat milligram figure for a stranger, with the per-kilogram step and the supervision both deleted. A conversion that has genuinely been performed changes the number and says what it divided by.

What is in a vial sold as 10mg?

Vials bought from three online shops, all sold as 10mg, and what a laboratory found in them: researchers bought Melanotan II vials from three online shops and measured them by liquid chromatography with UV detection at 218 nm plus tandem mass spectrometry on the doubly charged precursor at m/z 513, validated against guidelines for assessing active substances in authorized medicinal products. Every shop claimed its vials held 10mg. The total Melanotan II found ranged from 4.32 to 8.84mg (Breindahl, 2015).

Impurities, from the same measurement: vials from two of the three shops carried unknown impurities of 4.1 to 5.9 percent, and impurities from the third fell below the limit of quantification. Unknown means unidentified, not absent.

A second laboratory we read weighed a vial labeled the same way, and it came up short twice over: a forensic toxicology laboratory received two vials of pharmaceutical appearance seized in a police raid, one holding 2mL of liquid and the other holding 8.7mg of powder, which its results record as "contrary to the 10 mg indicated on the label". The powder returned no match in that laboratory's own library, so it was identified against a purchased reference standard by HPLC with diode-array detection and by mass spectrometry, and the same calibration curve put the purity of the powder at 30 percent, which the paper works out as 2.61mg of Melanotan II (Deville and Charlier, 2024). Its discussion puts that figure beside the range above without any help from us: 2.61mg, it says, "is lower than the quantities observed in the study conducted by Breindahl et al.", which is the 4.32 to 8.84mg in the first paragraph of this section. So both laboratories measured how much Melanotan II a vial sold as 10mg actually held, and the second found less than any vial in the first: 8.7mg of powder before purity was counted, and 2.61mg of peptide after.

What that does to every unit count anyone can calculate: the arithmetic further down divides the vial's stated mass by the water volume. If the stated mass is wrong, the concentration is wrong by exactly the same proportion, and so is the milligram amount that any unit reading delivers.

The spread in that last column is the point: across the three shops in that study, the same water volume and the same unit reading delivered 0.432mg to 0.884mg, against the 1mg the label alone would have implied. The forensic laboratory's 2.61mg of peptide, through the identical division, delivers 0.261mg, just over a quarter of the label figure, which puts that vial below every row in the table. What a certificate of analysis can and cannot settle about a number like that is worked through in how to read a peptide COA.

How many units is 1mg of Melanotan 2?

Why this section carries no dose: the arithmetic below runs on a vial size and a water volume, and on nothing about you. The 1mg figure is used throughout because it divides cleanly, not because anything tested it.

The vial size in the table is the one the assay study found on sale: 10mg, which is what all three shops in that study claimed. The water volume is a choice made at the bench, and what it sets is resolution on the barrel rather than strength in the glass.

A fivefold spread on one milligram figure: the same 1mg reads as 10 units on one mix and 50 on another, and the two are indistinguishable until the concentration is named. That is why a bare unit count posted without a vial size and a water volume carries no information at all. The general form of that division, for any vial and any water volume, sits in the reconstitution calculator.

Carrying a trial figure through the same division: 0.025mg per kg on a 70kg participant is 1.75mg, and 1.75mg on the 5mg per mL mix above is 0.35mL, which reads as 35 units on a U-100 barrel. The division is exact. The 70kg is an assumption, and the 1996 escalation is what supplied the 0.025.

One assumption every unit count above is sitting on: the syringe scale. Each figure here is a U-100 count, and the other scale in circulation reads 40 units to the milliliter, so the same printed number means a different volume on it. The two scales have their own page.

What's not known yet?

Still unapproved: Melanotan II is not FDA approved for any indication, and searching FDA's own approvals database by active ingredient on 2 August 2026 returned no matching application at all, against one for each of the three approved alpha-MSH analogues run the same way, setmelanotide included on 3 August 2026. We found no approval for it in the UK or Australian regulator material we read either, all of which treats it as an unapproved product rather than a licensed one. That is a statement about the documents and the database queries recorded below, not a search of every register on earth.

No modern dose-finding of any kind: the escalation that stepped from 0.01 to 0.03mg per kg in 0.005mg per kg increments enrolled three men and was published in 1996. Nothing since has repeated or widened it. The one later trial that gave Melanotan II to people held it at a single fixed 10 micrograms alongside SM-88, melanin, phenytoin and sirolimus, which cannot answer a dose question about this peptide (Stega, 2020).

No human pharmacokinetics we could retrieve, so we can point to no published half-life, no published clearance, and no basis for saying what a second injection adds to a first.

No long-term human safety dataset. What exists is a case-report literature, which counts harms that reached a clinician and cannot count exposures that did not, so it can never produce a rate.

Three holes, and none of them is small:

• No controlled test of the tanning use at any useful size. The pigmentation finding is placebo-controlled and real, and it is two subjects in a 1996 safety escalation, which is what the products carrying this peptide are sold on. The one larger pigmentation result since is an adverse event in a combination that also gave melanin.
• No published protocol beyond two weeks for this peptide on its own. The longest exposure in those three trials is ten weekday visits, five of them carrying peptide. The six-week cycle that does exist gave it inside a cancer regimen of SM-88, melanin, phenytoin and sirolimus, and the longer exposures after that, 3 to 4 weeks and 64 days, are case reports of people dosing themselves, not protocols.
• No verified content in what is being sold. Both laboratory measurements we could retrieve came in under the label: one weighed vials from three shops at 4.32 to 8.84mg against a stated 10mg, and the other weighed 8.7mg of powder in a vial labeled 10mg and then found that powder 30 percent pure, or 2.61mg of peptide.

Any number offered as a fix for those three gaps came from the page offering it, not from the record.

One problem sits ahead of all three, and it is the larger one: the peptide has no approved product anywhere in the material we read, so there is no regulatory specification behind any of it and the label on the glass is what identity, purity, sterility and strength all rest on. Both laboratory measurements we could retrieve found that label wanting: one weighed every vial below its stated mass, and the other weighed less powder than the label claimed and then found only 30 percent of that powder was the peptide.

How this page is sourced

Read off the papers and the regulator pages themselves: each figure above was read out of the document it is credited to, and not out of anyone's summary of that document. Abstracts and the regulator pages were retrieved on 2 August 2026, and the entries added in the 3 August correction pass were read that day, each noted with its date in the list below.

34 sources: 22 peer-reviewed papers, reviews and case reports, 8 US regulator documents and database records, 1 UK regulator letter, 1 Australian regulator page, and 2 dated database searches printed with the query that produced them.

What the 3 August pass changed, because a correction that is not visible is not a correction: an earlier version of this page said the chart held every published human figure and that the trial record stopped in 2000. Both were too strong. A later trial, a first-in-human oncology study, gave 10 micrograms of Melanotan II alongside SM-88, melanin, phenytoin and sirolimus to 30 people for a six-week cycle, and PubMed's clinical-trial filter cannot see it because the name appears only in the full text. Two amounts already sitting in this page's own bibliography, from Peters 2020 and Bonchev 2026, were missing from the chart. The completeness claim is now bounded to what we traced, in the heading, the short answer, the meta description and the page's structured data, the three missing rows are in the chart, and the 1998 row now carries the administered range rather than only the amount its conclusion recommended.

What a second pass the same day changed, because the first pass introduced errors of its own: four corrections, all of them to sentences written earlier on 3 August 2026. The forensic paper on a seized vial had been described from its abstract as a purity result that measured no mass, and its full text says the opposite: it weighed 8.7mg of powder against a 10mg label and put the peptide content at 2.61mg, a figure the paper itself compares with the 4.32 to 8.84mg range above it. The four clinical-trial reports had been turned into four separate trials, when the fourth pools the twenty men of the two crossovers and adds nobody, so there are four reports of three trials. The cancer regimen had been counted as four drugs with Melanotan II inside it, when the paper names four components, SM-88, melanin, phenytoin and sirolimus, and the peptide is a fifth substance given alongside them, which also explains why that paper attributes the pigmentation it saw to melanin as well as to the peptide. And the count of US-approved melanocortins had been corrected from two to three without narrowing what it was counting, which left out approved corticotropin products; the page now counts alpha-MSH analogues and says what that excludes.

How the trial-count claims here were tested, because a count is a claim about a whole literature: on 2 August 2026 we ran PubMed's own Clinical Trial publication-type filter for the query melanotan II, which returns 4 records: Dorr 1996, Wessells 1998, Wessells 2000 in Urology, and the 2000 Int J Impot Res paper, which reviews the same 20 men as the two crossovers rather than adding new ones. That filter reran to the same 4 on 3 August 2026, and on the same day we established what it cannot see. Asking PubMed for the SM-88 first-in-human record and the phrase "melanotan ii" together returns 0, while asking for that record on its own returns 1, so the phrase is absent from everything PubMed indexes for it. Europe PMC indexes full text: its body search for the phrase, filtered to clinical trials, returns 2 records, of which that study is the one that administered the peptide. A count from a title-and-abstract index is therefore a count of that index, never of the literature, and this page says so wherever it prints one. ClinicalTrials.gov, searched the same day for Melanotan, returns 1 record, and that record is not a study anybody is running: its summary field opens "This example interventional study record describes". We described it here as one of the registry's own worked examples until we opened the record and checked, and that was wrong. The registry does not appear in it anywhere. Its organization and lead sponsor fields both name a private company, class INDUSTRY, and the responsible party is that sponsor, so the word "example" is the sponsor's own description of what it posted, not the registry's label for a demonstration file. That distinction is worth the sentence it costs, because it is the difference between a database publishing a sample and somebody putting a self-declared example into a public registry under a real accession number. Either way it is not evidence, so it is cited nowhere on this page, its identifier is printed nowhere on this page, and it is counted in no figure. Searched for afamelanotide, the name of one of the approved molecules, the same database returns 23 real records, which is what a registered program looks like and is the contrast worth having.

What we could not retrieve, stated rather than hidden: the live TGA website answered every request from our network on 2 August 2026 with HTTP 403, a bot challenge rather than a missing page, so we could not read the current page ourselves. The Australian material is therefore quoted from a dated snapshot of the TGA page in the Internet Archive and is labeled as such in the list below. Two more, added on 3 August 2026: the pooled Int J Impot Res paper is closed access, so everything credited to it here comes from its abstract and nothing from its methods; and the repository interface that serves the 2018 forum survey answered our requests with HTTP 403, so no figure from that paper's body is printed on this page. The forensic identification paper was on this list earlier the same day and has come off it: the published article is open access, it was retrieved in full from the University of Liege institutional repository, and that full text is where the 8.7mg and the 2.61mg come from. Nothing on this page is attributed to a document we did not open.

Where the rules behind that live: the standard we hold a citation to, and how we check one, is set out on the methodology page. If a figure here ever needs a correction, the correction is recorded there before it is made on this page.

Last reviewed: 2 August 2026.

1. 1

   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. doi:10.1016/0024-3205(96)00160-9. PMID 8637402.

2. 2

   Wessells H, Fuciarelli K, Hansen J, et al. Synthetic melanotropic peptide initiates erections in men with psychogenic erectile dysfunction: double-blind, placebo controlled crossover study. J Urol. 1998;160(2):389-393. PubMed lists no DOI for this record. PMID 9679884.

3. 3

   Wessells H, Gralnek D, Dorr R, Hruby VJ, Hadley ME, Levine N. Effect of an alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone analog on penile erection and sexual desire in men with organic erectile dysfunction. Urology. 2000;56(4):641-646. doi:10.1016/s0090-4295(00)00680-4. PMID 11018622.

4. 4

   Wessells H, Levine N, Hadley ME, Dorr R, Hruby V. Melanocortin receptor agonists, penile erection, and sexual motivation: human studies with Melanotan II. Int J Impot Res. 2000;12 Suppl 4:S74-S79. Source for the pooled 20-subject figures and the 12.9 percent severe-nausea rate. doi:10.1038/sj.ijir.3900582. PMID 11035391.

5. 5

   Breindahl T, Evans-Brown M, Hindersson P, McVeigh J, Bellis M, Stensballe A, Kimergard A. Identification and characterization by LC-UV-MS/MS of melanotan II skin-tanning products sold illegally on the Internet. Drug Test Anal. 2015;7(2):164-172. Source for the 4.32 to 8.84mg assayed range against a 10mg claim, and for the 4.1 to 5.9 percent unknown impurities. doi:10.1002/dta.1655. PMID 24771717.

6. 6

   Nelson ME, Bryant SM, Aks SE. Melanotan II injection resulting in systemic toxicity and rhabdomyolysis. Clin Toxicol (Phila). 2012;50(10):1169-1173. doi:10.3109/15563650.2012.740637. PMID 23121206.

7. 7

   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(10):975-980. Source for the dosage-uncertainty sentence, the four melanoma case reports, and the afamelanotide approval framing. doi:10.1111/ijd.13585. PMID 28266027.

8. 8

   Hjuler KF, Lorentzen HF. Melanoma associated with the use of melanotan-II. Dermatology. 2014;228(1):34-36. doi:10.1159/000356389. PMID 24355990.

9. 9

   Ong S, Bowling J. Melanotan-associated melanoma in situ. Australas J Dermatol. 2012;53(4):301-302. doi:10.1111/j.1440-0960.2012.00915.x. PMID 22724573.

10. 10

    Kaski D, Stafford N, Mehta A, Jenkins IH, Malhotra P. Melanotan and the posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome. Ann Intern Med. 2013;158(9):707-708. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-158-9-201305070-00020. PMID 23648958.

11. 11

    Dreyer BA, Amer T, Fraser M. Melanotan-induced priapism: a hard-earned tan. BMJ Case Rep. 2019;12(2):e227644. doi:10.1136/bcr-2018-227644. PMID 30796078.

12. 12

    Peters B, Hadimeri H, Wahlberg R, Afghahi H. Melanotan II: a possible cause of renal infarction: review of the literature and case report. CEN Case Rep. 2020;9(2):159-161. doi:10.1007/s13730-020-00447-z. PMID 31953620.

13. 13

    Gilhooley E, Daly S, McKenna D. Melanotan II user experience: a qualitative study of online discussion forums. Dermatology. 2021;237(6):995-999. Abstract read for the 623 entries, the 205 participants, the January 2016 to October 2017 window and the named themes; the full text is behind a subscription and was not read. doi:10.1159/000514492. PMID 34464955.

14. 14

    Yassin Alsabbagh A, Bhujel N, Singh RP. Melanotan II nasal spray: a possible risk factor for oral mucosal malignant melanoma? Int J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2025;54(9):806-808. doi:10.1016/j.ijom.2025.03.014. PMID 40210573.

15. 15

    Mallory CW, Lopategui DM, Cordon BH. Melanotan Tanning Injection: A Rare Cause of Priapism. Sex Med. 2021;9(1):100298. Source for the flat 2mg subcutaneous amount, the years of annual use behind it, and the surgical outcome. Full text read in PubMed Central, PMC7930850, on 2 August 2026. doi:10.1016/j.esxm.2020.100298. PMID 33460908.

16. 16

    Vadner DJ, Smith S. Five primary melanomas in situ in a patient with recent tanning bed use, melanotan exposure, and anabolic hormone use. JAAD Case Rep. 2026;73:111-114. Source for the self-reported microgram escalation and the five excised melanomas in situ, in a patient who was also using a tanning bed, melanotan 1 and unregulated testosterone, which the report presents as co-occurrence rather than cause. Full text read in PubMed Central, PMC13279914, on 2 August 2026. doi:10.1016/j.jdcr.2026.05.009. PMID 42328529.

17. 17

    Bonchev A. Changes in Oral Mucosa Associated with Melanotan II Injections: A Case Report. Life (Basel). 2026;16(2):265. Source for the 64-day self-administered exposure and the three-month follow-up on oral pigmentation. doi:10.3390/life16020265. PMID 41752902.

18. 18

    Callaghan DJ 3rd. A glimpse into the underground market of melanotan. Dermatol Online J. 2018;24(5):13030/qt2gz9f9jk. The other of the two forum studies this page uses, and the earlier of the two by publication date, cited for its existence and for the topics it asked about rather than for any amount, since it reports none. doi:10.5070/D3245040036. PMID 30142729.

19. 19

    Raposinho PD, Xavier C, Correia JD, Falcao S, Gomes P, Santos I. Melanoma targeting with alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone analogs labeled with fac-[99mTc(CO)3]+: effect of cyclization on tumor-seeking properties. J Biol Inorg Chem. 2008;13(3):449-459. The single record returned by the pharmacokinetics search recorded below, and a study in melanoma-bearing mice rather than in people. doi:10.1007/s00775-007-0338-3. PMID 18183429.

20. 20

    Stega J, Noel MS, Vandell AG, Stega D, Del Priore G, Hoffman S. A first-in-human study of the novel metabolism-based anti-cancer agent SM-88 in subjects with advanced metastatic cancer. Invest New Drugs. 2020;38(2):392-401. Published online 30 March 2019, and typed by PubMed as Clinical Trial, Phase I. Source for the flat 10 microgram Melanotan II component of the subcutaneous suspension, the 30 subjects of whom 21 were female and 9 male, the six-week cycle given on the first five days of each week and continued if tolerated, and the hyperpigmentation reported in all 30 as an expected consequence of giving melanin and Melanotan II together. The four components that paper names as SMK Therapy are SM-88, melanin, phenytoin and sirolimus, and Melanotan II is a fifth substance, carried in one of the two subcutaneous suspensions and named nowhere in the abstract, so nothing in this trial is a Melanotan II result on its own. Full text read in PubMed Central, PMC7066285, on 3 August 2026, and reread there on the same day after an earlier version of this page described the peptide as one of four agents in the regimen, which undercounted it by one and left melanin out of every mention of the combination. doi:10.1007/s10637-019-00758-8. PMID 30929156.

21. 21

    King SH, Mayorov AV, Balse-Srinivasan P, Hruby VJ, Vanderah TW, Wessells H. Melanocortin receptors, melanotropic peptides and penile erection. Curr Top Med Chem. 2007;7(11):1098-1106. A review of this program whose senior author is the first author of the 1998 crossover, cited for its statement that the 10 men with psychogenic erectile dysfunction "received subcutaneous doses ranging from 0.025 to 0.157 mg/kg, while erections were monitored by RigiScan over a 6-hour period", and for its account of the organic study, in which "10 men received 2 subcutaneous doses of 0.025 mg/kg MT-II and 2 doses of vehicle". This is the source for the 1998 administered range, which the 1998 abstract does not print. Full text read in PubMed Central, PMC2694735, on 3 August 2026. Two bibliographic cautions, both checked rather than assumed: PubMed carries no DOI field for this record, and the DOI Europe PMC attaches to it, 10.2174/156802607780906564, resolves at Crossref to a different paper in the same issue, so it is not printed here. The DOI below is the one whose Crossref title, journal and issue match this article: Melanocortin Receptors, Melanotropic Peptides and Penile Erection, Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry, volume 7, issue 11. Its Crossref author list does not match, and an earlier version of this page said it did. Crossref deposits four names for this DOI, Wessells, Hruby, Balse-Srinivasan and King; PubMed and PubMed Central both give the six printed above. The six here are PubMed's, checked against Crossref on 3 August 2026 rather than assumed to agree. The publisher's own record gives its pages as 1111-1119 while PubMed and PubMed Central give 1098-1106; we print PubMed's range and record the disagreement rather than pick silently. doi:10.2174/1568026610707011111. PMID 17584130. PMC2694735.

22. 22

    Deville M, Charlier C. Barbie drug identification: Not a child's play. J Forensic Sci. 2024;69(6):2331-2338. Published online 20 September 2024. Source for the two seized vials, the 8.7mg of powder weighed against a 10mg label, the 30 percent purity determined against a purchased reference standard, and the 2.61mg of Melanotan II that purity works out to. Its results state that one vial "contained 8.7 mg of powder, contrary to the 10 mg indicated on the label", and its discussion states that "The purity of the powder was only 30% (2.61 mg)" and that this amount "is lower than the quantities observed in the study conducted by Breindahl et al.", whose range is the 4.32 to 8.84mg printed above. Both quotations were counted in the retrieved article and occur once each; the paper is set in two columns, so a naive text extraction interleaves them with the neighbouring column and returns zero, which is a fact about the extraction and not about the paper. Read in full from the open-access article deposited in the University of Liege institutional repository on 3 August 2026, HTTP 200, application/pdf, 1,893,642 bytes. An earlier version of this page said only the abstract had been read, called this paper the second published check on such material, and described its result as a purity figure rather than a mass against a stated 10mg. All three were wrong, and the full text is what corrected them. doi:10.1111/1556-4029.15633. PMID 39302005.

23. 23

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Certain Bulk Drug Substances for Use in Compounding that May Present Significant Safety Risks. Table of substances previously in category 2 whose nominations were withdrawn by the nominators, Melanotan II entry, for the immunogenicity wording and the named case-report categories. Page content current as of 22 April 2026, retrieved 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. fda.gov compounding safety-risk page.

24. 24

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Import Alert 66-41, Detention Without Physical Examination of Unapproved New Drugs Promoted In The U.S. Red list entries naming melanotan peptides. The entry whose product description reads Melanotan II carries the note "China"; the entries whose description names both melanotan peptides together are the ones carrying the note about import for non-human research purposes. Fields compared row by row in the printable alert. Alert published date 31 July 2026 as displayed, retrieved 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. accessdata.fda.gov import alert 66-41.

25. 25

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration. July 23-24, 2026: Meeting of the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee. Cited for its published agenda, which names the seven substances reviewed and does not include Melanotan II. Retrieved 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. fda.gov meeting page.

26. 26

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Drugs@FDA record for SCENESSE (afamelanotide) 16mg implant, application NDA 210797, sponsor listed as Clivunel Inc, original submission approved 8 October 2019, marketing status prescription. Product line reads SCENESSE, AFAMELANOTIDE, 16MG, IMPLANT;SUBCUTANEOUS, prescription. Read on the Drugs@FDA overview page and cross-checked against the openFDA drugsfda endpoint, both on 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. accessdata.fda.gov application record.

27. 27

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Drugs@FDA record for VYLEESI (bremelanotide) autoinjector solution, subcutaneous, application NDA 210557, original submission approved 21 June 2019, marketing status prescription. Read through the openFDA drugsfda endpoint, which returns exactly one application for the active ingredient BREMELANOTIDE, on 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. openFDA drugsfda query, BREMELANOTIDE.

28. 28

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Drugs@FDA record for IMCIVREE (setmelanotide) injection, solution, subcutaneous, application NDA 213793, sponsor listed as Rhythm, original submission approved 25 November 2020, marketing status prescription. Its FDA label calls setmelanotide "a melanocortin 4 (MC4) receptor agonist" and an eight amino acid cyclic peptide analogue of the endogenous melanocortin peptide alpha-MSH. Read through the openFDA drugsfda endpoint, which returns exactly one application for the active ingredient SETMELANOTIDE, and the openFDA label endpoint, both on 3 August 2026, HTTP 200 with substantive JSON. Source for the correction from two US-approved alpha-MSH analogues to three. openFDA drugsfda query, SETMELANOTIDE.

29. 29

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration, openFDA Drugs@FDA endpoint, active-ingredient search for MELANOTAN II, run 2 August 2026. The service returned its "No matches found" response, which is the negative result for that endpoint, while the same query form returned one approved application for AFAMELANOTIDE and one for BREMELANOTIDE on the same day. Source for the statement that Melanotan II holds no US approval for any indication. openFDA drugsfda query, MELANOTAN II.

30. 30

    Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. Response to freedom of information request FOI 21/1237, 20 December 2021, on Yellow Card reports for melanotan II products including nasal sprays and injections between 2011 and 2021. Source for the 13 reports, the enforcement sentence, and the medicinal-product classification wording. PDF retrieved 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. gov.uk publication page, response PDF.

31. 31

    Therapeutic Goods Administration. Don't risk using tanning products containing melanotan. Blog post published 24 January 2025. Read from an Internet Archive snapshot captured 9 July 2026, because the live host answered our requests with HTTP 403 on 2 August 2026; the archived copy also carries the linked media release summary of 21 May 2026 recording 27 infringement notices totalling $101,412. Archived TGA page.

32. 32

    PubMed, US National Library of Medicine. Searches run 2 August 2026, each printed here with the query that produced it, all HTTP 200. The exact phrase "melanotan ii" across all fields returned 242 records; the same query with the Clinical Trial publication-type filter returned 4, PMIDs 8637402, 9679884, 11018622 and 11035391; the broader term melanotan across all fields returned 278, which is why the 242 is described on this page as a phrase count rather than as the literature; and "melanotan ii" paired with pharmacokinetics, both as Title/Abstract terms, returned 1, PMID 18183429. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

33. 33

    ClinicalTrials.gov, API v2 studies endpoint, intervention search for Melanotan with countTotal, run 2 August 2026 against the 31 July 2026 data snapshot the API version endpoint reports. HTTP 200, total 1. That record's organization and lead sponsor fields both name the same private company, class INDUSTRY, its responsible party is that sponsor, and its brief summary opens "This example interventional study record describes"; the registry itself is named nowhere in it. Its accession number is deliberately not printed on this page. Control search for afamelanotide, same endpoint and parameter, HTTP 200, total 23. ClinicalTrials.gov v2 query, Melanotan.

34. 34

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration, openFDA Drugs@FDA endpoint, active-ingredient searches for CORTICOTROPIN and COSYNTROPIN, run 3 August 2026, both HTTP 200 with substantive JSON. The first returns 8 applications, including the prescription ACTHAR GEL products under NDA 008372; the second returns 4, including prescription CORTROSYN under NDA 016750. The openFDA label endpoint for those products, HTTP 200 on the same day, states of the first that "Acthar Gel is also reported to bind to melanocortin receptors" and of the second that "Cosyntropin is an adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). Cosyntropin is synthetic beta 1 - 24 corticotropin, a synthetic subunit of ACTH". Cited as the reason this page counts approved analogues of alpha-MSH rather than approved melanocortins, since these are melanocortin-family products with US approvals older than any of the three named above. openFDA drugsfda query, CORTICOTROPIN, openFDA drugsfda query, COSYNTROPIN.