MOTS-c Dosage Guide 2026: The Research vs Reported Use

The calculator

What the converter wants, and what it hands back: a vial size, a water amount, a syringe type and a milligram figure go in. The concentration, the volume and the unit count come out.

MOTS-c dosage chart: every published figure, with its species

One row per source, species printed beside it: every MOTS-c amount we could trace to a named source, with the species and the route printed next to it. There is no beginner row and no maintenance row, because nothing in the record supports one.

What a number means here depends entirely on the species it came from: it decides what the number means. Every milligram-per-kilogram figure below was given to a rodent, and one of them to an isolated heart on a perfusion rig rather than to a living animal. The one human trial record specifies a route and a schedule and no milligram value at all.

One compound, six spellings: the same peptide gets written MOTS-c, MOTS c, mot-c, mot c, motc and motsc across vendor listings, forum threads and search boxes. They all point at the same 16-amino-acid mitochondrial peptide, and everything on this page applies to all of them.

The conversion we are not doing: the milligram-per-kilogram figures above are rodent amounts, and this page does not carry them across into a human number. Nothing in the sources listed at the bottom converts one into the other, so any page that hands you a human milligram figure derived from those rows added a step the research did not.

The conversion we are doing: milligrams into syringe units, further down. That one is arithmetic, and it holds whatever the milligram figure is and wherever it came from.

Can a mouse milligram-per-kilogram figure be converted into a human dose?

A published method exists, and it belongs to FDA: the July 2005 guidance for industry titled Estimating the Maximum Safe Starting Dose in Initial Clinical Trials for Therapeutics in Adult Healthy Volunteers sets out the standard interspecies conversion, normalized to body surface area rather than to body weight.

What its table specifies for a mouse: Table 1 of that document assigns the mouse a km factor of 3 against 37 for a human, and gives the shortcut in its own column: an animal dose in milligrams per kilogram becomes a human equivalent dose in milligrams per kilogram when it is divided by 12.3. The table's footnote records the assumption sitting underneath every figure in it, a 60kg human. For a rat the divisor in that column is 6.2.

What the algorithm accepts as input, in the guidance's own words: "only the NOAEL should be used directly in the algorithm for calculating an MRSD". The NOAEL is the no observed adverse effect level identified in an animal toxicity study, which makes it a toxicology figure rather than an efficacy figure.

What comes out at the other end: not a dose, a ceiling on a first one. The document describes its own purpose as deriving the maximum recommended starting dose for first-in-human trials in adult healthy volunteers, "regardless of the projected clinical use", and the human equivalent dose is then divided again by a safety factor whose default value the guidance puts at 10.

Why none of that reaches the rows in the chart above: the rodent amounts on this page come from metabolic, physical-capacity and cardioprotection experiments. They are the amounts that produced an effect, not no observed adverse effect levels from a toxicity program, so the algorithm has nothing to take. Supply it one and its answer would still be the largest opening dose a monitored trial should consider, which is a different quantity from a figure somebody draws into a syringe at home.

So this page publishes no human equivalent dose for MOTS-c, and the reason is not squeamishness about arithmetic. The conversion has a method, the method has a required input, and that input has never been published for this peptide.

What the protocol pages do instead, described mechanically: a per-kilogram animal figure is reprinted as a flat milligram-per-day human figure, with no surface-area step, no divisor and no safety factor, and the digits arrive unchanged on the other side. That is the tell worth knowing. A conversion that has actually been performed changes the number.

How often do you take MOTS-c, and how long is a cycle?

The frequencies that exist in the record: twice daily, once daily, and three times weekly. All three come from the two mouse papers and the one trial registry record in the chart above, and every one of them is a schedule with no published human milligram figure attached.

The cycle lengths that exist in the record: 4 days, 7 days, 2 weeks, 8 weeks and 12 weeks in the mouse work; 7 days and 28 days in the CB4211 analog trial. In the Reynolds late-life arm the schedule dropped to three times weekly after eight weeks of daily injections, at 23.5 months of age. Not one of those durations belongs to a study that gave MOTS-c itself to a person.

What that does and does not settle: the record has plenty to say about how often and for how long. It has nothing to say about how much, in a person. A frequency without a dose is half an answer, and half an answer is what the evidence currently supports.

Morning or evening, per the registry: the one registry record here specifies a once-daily schedule and does not name a time of day.

The one schedule with a stop date attached: the CB4211 analog trial, which ran one cohort for 28 days and finished in April 2021 without posting results. That is the only human schedule on this page with a beginning and an end, and it belongs to a different molecule.

What a single-exposure study adds, which is a warning rather than a schedule: the 2026 rat heart work exposed the tissue once, for ten minutes, on a perfusion rig. It is in the chart because it is a published exogenous amount, not because it describes a frequency anyone could repeat.

No off period appears anywhere in the record: none of the four study records describes a washout, a break, or a second block after a first. The idea of a MOTS-c cycle with an off phase comes from the protocol pages, not from a published protocol.

What the protocol pages supply instead: the pages that rank for mot-c cycle length queries do hand over schedules and cycle blocks. Those are conventions, not findings, and they are recorded in the reported-use section below rather than repeated here as though a trial produced them.

Which route did the studies use, and does it change the milligram figure?

Three routes appear in the record and no two of them are interchangeable: the mouse work went into the peritoneal cavity, the one human trial record is subcutaneous, and the 2026 rat study did not inject an animal at all.

The rodent route: Lee 2015 and Reynolds 2021 both delivered MOTS-c intraperitoneally, and Reynolds states it in the same sentence as the amount, that MOTS-c "was administered daily at 5 or 15 mg/kg via intraperitoneal injections". The rat cardioprotection study is further away again: the peptide reached the tissue in Krebs-Henseleit perfusion buffer, through the coronary circulation of a heart already outside the animal.

The human route: subcutaneous in the one registry record here, the CB4211 analog program. It publishes no milligram value beside it, so the route is the only administration detail it settles, and it settles it for the analog rather than for MOTS-c.

Why route sits underneath the species problem rather than beside it: a milligram amount only becomes an exposure once absorption is known, and absorption is a property of the route. A PubMed search pairing MOTS-c with pharmacokinetics, both as [Title/Abstract] terms, returned 0 records on 2 August 2026. The comparison that would let a figure from one route be read as a figure from another has not been published for this peptide in a form that search reaches.

Which is why the chart above prints route in its own column and never carries a number across one. The rat paper's own authors put it plainly, calling for broader dosing and pharmacokinetic studies before any translational application. What trial documents do and do not record about route and site is worked through separately on the injection-sites page.

Is CB4211 the same thing as MOTS-c?

No, and that distinction carries the human readouts quoted on this page: CB4211 is an analog of MOTS-c, described that way by the company that developed it. The late-breaking poster its phase 1 data was presented in is titled "CB4211, a Novel Analog of MOTS-c", which is the sponsor's own wording rather than a characterization of ours.

Why the difference bites harder here than it usually would: the 88-subject tolerability result, the liver-enzyme and glucose movements against placebo and the four-week body-weight trend all belong to CB4211. They are the only human readouts anywhere near this compound, and not one of them was produced by MOTS-c.

What the registry holds: NCT03998514, the CB4211 program, completed April 2021, no results posted. That is the only interventional record on the registry that put either molecule into a person, and the molecule it put in was the analog. For MOTS-c itself the registry holds nothing that administers it.

What peer review holds on the analog: nothing. A PubMed search for CB4211 across all fields returned zero records when it was re-run on 2 August 2026, so the phase 1 exists as a company release and a conference abstract and has never been through review in any journal.

The practical consequence: a page that reassures about MOTS-c by pointing at an 88-subject phase 1 has pointed at a different molecule, on the route and schedule that molecule was given on. What the ranking pages actually cite for their safety lines is set out in the reconcile section below.

Where do the internet doses come from?

The two ways this question usually gets ducked: most pages either ignore it, or hand over a schedule built on mouse data. We're doing neither.

No figure on this page is offered as yours, and no human dose has been published that anyone could offer.

What the right-hand column is doing, mechanically: taking a milligram-per-kilogram figure measured in mice and printing it as a flat milligram-per-day figure for people. That is not a conversion with a method behind it. It is the same digits with the species label removed.

MOTS-c reconstitution by vial size: 5mg, 10mg, 20mg and 40mg

The question people actually type: how much bacteriostatic water goes into a 10mg MOTS-c vial. The honest answer is that the water volume is a choice, not a property of the vial, and the choice is what sets the concentration. The vial does not specify one.

So the table below does the only thing that can be done honestly: it runs the arithmetic for the vial sizes that turn up in listings and protocol pages, at water volumes those same pages use, 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 and makes the rows comparable. The general version of this arithmetic, with any vial and any water volume, is in concentration versus dose and in the reconstitution calculator.

Why the 10mg vial is the one people ask about: it is small enough that the water volume changes how finely the syringe can measure. At 10mg in 1mL, one unit carries 0.1mg. At 10mg in 2mL, one unit carries 0.05mg, so the same milligram figure spans twice as many unit marks and a one-unit misread moves it half as far. Same vial, same peptide, different resolution.

The 40mg case runs the other way: at 40mg in 1mL a 1mg figure lands on 2.5 units, which is not a whole unit. The same vial in 2mL puts it on 5 units, which is. That is an arithmetic property of the mix, and it explains something that looks like a contradiction online: two motc charts can quote the same vial, quote different unit counts, and both be doing the arithmetic correctly. The water volume they assumed is the variable neither chart printed. We took that apart in the anatomy of two charts that disagree.

How much bacteriostatic water goes into a 10mg MOTS-c vial?

Nothing in the record answers it, and that is the answer: not one of the sources at the bottom of this page reconstituted a 10mg MOTS-c vial, so there is no tested volume to report. The water volume is a choice made at the bench, and what it sets is resolution on the barrel, not strength in the vial.

What the arithmetic does at four volumes, on a U-100 syringe: at 0.5mL the vial holds 20mg per mL and one unit carries 0.2mg, so 1mg falls on 5 units. At 1mL it holds 10mg per mL, one unit carries 0.1mg, and 1mg falls on 10 units. At 2mL it holds 5mg per mL, one unit carries 0.05mg (50mcg), and 1mg falls on 20 units. At 3mL one unit carries a thirtieth of a milligram and 1mg falls on 30 units.

The shape of that: the unit count for a fixed milligram figure scales with the water, straight up, while the milligrams in the glass never move. Ten milligrams is ten milligrams at every one of those volumes.

What more water buys and what it costs: more marks per milligram, so a one-unit misread moves the amount less far. The trade is total volume, since the same milligram figure sits in a larger draw at every step down in concentration.

Why the 10mg vial is the one this question gets asked about: it is the smaller of the two sizes the protocol pages are built around, and it is small enough that the water choice changes the resolution by a factor of six across the range above. On the 40mg vial the same choice changes which milligram figures land on whole units at all, which is the case the reconstitution table covers.

None of those four volumes is a recommendation and none of them came from a study. They are round numbers picked to show the spread, run through the same division as everything else on this page, and the general form of that division for any vial sits in the reconstitution calculator linked above.

How does the units math work on a 40mg vial?

Why this section carries no dose: the arithmetic below runs on a vial size and a water volume, and on nothing about you.

The 40mg vial, because that is the one in the questions: say it gets reconstituted with 2mL of bacteriostatic water. The vial now holds 20mg per mL, which is 20,000mcg per mL.

Now the barrel: a U-100 insulin syringe fits 100 units into a mL, so one unit is a hundredth of a mL, worth 200mcg, or 0.2mg at this concentration. That puts 1mg on 5 units, 2mg on 10 units, and 10mg on 50 units.

The same vial with half the water: 40mg in 1mL rather than 2mL, which doubles the concentration to 40mg per mL.

Every mark is worth twice as much: one unit carries 0.4mg where it carried 0.2mg, so the same 2mg lands on 5 units, not 10.

Or hold the water and change the vial: 10mg in 2mL gives 5mg per mL, one unit is 50mcg, and 2mg reads as 40 units.

Which is why a bare "10 units" means nothing: that reading is 2mg on one reconstitution and 0.5mg on another, and the two are indistinguishable until the concentration is named.

One number the table above cannot show, because every row assumes it: the 10, 5 and 40 unit counts worked out above are all U-100 counts. Pulled on the other scale in circulation, each of them delivers two and a half times the volume it was derived for, and that multiplier sits on top of whichever row of the concentration table applies rather than replacing it. The two scales have their own page.

How many units is 2mg of MOTS-c?

An eightfold spread across three ordinary mixes: on the most-asked one, a 40mg vial plus 2mL of water (20mg per mL), 2mg reads as 10 units on a U-100 syringe. The same vial plus 1mL reads 5 units. A 10mg vial plus 2mL reads 40 units.

Which is the answer to a different question than the one asked: the heading asks about milligrams and the syringe answers in volume, so the number that reconciles them is the concentration, and the concentration was set by whoever added the water. That is the one line every page in our dose math index is built on.

What's not known yet?

Still investigational: MOTS-c is not FDA approved as of July 2026, for any indication.

The compounding file, and where it went in July 2026: MOTS-c, free base and acetate, went before the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee on 23 July 2026, with obesity and osteoporosis named as the uses under evaluation, an earlier category 2 nomination having been withdrawn before that. What was at stake there is compounding access, not approval.

What the agency told the committee: in its briefing document FDA states that the nomination did not include, and it did not identify, any clinical studies or human exposure data for MOTS-c by any route, that its adverse event database returned no reports at all, and that the potential safety risks in humans are therefore unknown. On that basis it proposed that neither the free base nor the acetate be added to the 503A list.

What the committee did with that: the question in FDA's own meeting materials was whether each form should be placed on the list. The committee voted yes. Pharmaceutical Executive and NBC News, reporting from the meeting, put the MOTS-c tally at 7 in favor, 5 against and 2 abstentions, narrower than the 8 to 6 the same committee gave the three peptides voted before it. A recommendation is not a rule: the agency decides by rulemaking, and as of 29 July 2026 the meeting page carries an agenda, briefing documents and slides, with no minutes and no decision.

The trial pipeline, which is empty: no registered study is administering MOTS-c to people. FDA told the committee in July 2026 that it did not identify any clinical studies or human exposure data for MOTS-c by any route, and our own registry search on 2 August 2026 found none either. There is no published human dose because there has been no human study to produce one.

Three holes, and none of them is small:

• No peer-reviewed human dose-ranging study of MOTS-c. The one completed human trial tested an analog, and its full data never reached a journal.
• No published human safety data of any length, and no registered study collecting it. FDA's own adverse event database returned no reports at all.
• No verified data on the community schedules (5 to 15mg a day and the rest) that dominate the search results. None of it has been studied in a controlled human trial.

A page that fills those three holes with a number filled them in itself.

Bigger than all three, because it applies before any of them: nothing in the published record gives a human milligram figure, so on this compound the label on the vial is the only number anyone has to work from. Identity, purity, sterility and strength all rest on it, and not one of the four is independently checked.

Which makes it a vial question, not a dose question: every unit count above assumes the label is telling the truth, and it is that assumption, not the arithmetic, we would lose sleep over.

How this page is sourced

Read off the papers and the registry records themselves: every research figure on this page was taken from the cited source, never from somebody else's summary of it.

Twelve sources, and not one of them a human dose study: four peer-reviewed papers, one trial registry record, one registry search with its query and its date, two sponsor releases, three regulator documents, and one entry for the news reporting of the committee vote. Each is listed below with its identifier, and every figure on this page traces back to one of them.

What changed on 2 August 2026: three questions the record can answer were added and one row was added to the chart. A 2026 rat cardioprotection study is now cited for the only exogenous MOTS-c amounts published since Reynolds, which moved the low end of the published range from 0.5 to 0.25mg per kg and moved the species line from mouse to rodent everywhere it appeared. FDA's 2005 human equivalent dose guidance was pulled and added, so the mouse-to-human question is now answered from the agency's own algorithm and its own stated input rather than from our refusal to run one. The word analog, which this page has used for CB4211 since it was published, now carries the sponsor announcement that prints the poster title it comes from, retrieved the same day. The CB4211 PubMed search was re-run as well and still returns zero.

What we cut on 2 August 2026, stated plainly: this page carried registry record NCT07505745 as a recruiting phase 2a of MOTS-c itself, 120 adults planned, once daily for 12 weeks. It was a chart row, a cycle length, a route, a statistic, a paragraph in the research section, a line in the safety note and a reference entry. Every one of them is gone. The sponsor named on that record has eight studies on ClinicalTrials.gov, two of which describe themselves as specimens in their own summaries, one opening "This fictional study is an example of a ClinicalTrials.gov-style record". All eight share one facility and one pair of contact addresses, on an email domain that does not match the sponsor's name. NCT07505745 itself carries the study identifier EX-MOTS-2A-001. We cannot show that it is a fabrication and we are not claiming it. We are saying it cannot carry what this page hung on it, which was the single sentence a reader most wanted to be true, that the direct human test is finally under way. Our rule is that such a claim is cut rather than softened. What stands in its place is the finding: no registered trial administers MOTS-c to a person, which is also what FDA told its own advisory committee in July 2026.

What changed on 29 July 2026: the regulatory section said the July meeting record showed materials and no result. The FDA record still shows exactly that, and it is now stated alongside the vote itself, which is public through contemporaneous reporting rather than through the agency. The agency's own briefing document was pulled and added, so the "no human data" claim on this page now rests on FDA's words rather than on ours. The CB4211 PubMed search was re-run the same day and still returns zero.

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: 19 July 2026.

1. 1

   Lee C, Zeng J, Drew BG, et al. The mitochondrial-derived peptide MOTS-c promotes metabolic homeostasis and reduces obesity and insulin resistance. Cell Metab. 2015;21(3):443-454. doi:10.1016/j.cmet.2015.02.009. PMID 25738459.

2. 2

   Reynolds JC, Lai RW, Woodhead JST, et al. MOTS-c is an exercise-induced mitochondrial-encoded regulator of age-dependent physical decline and muscle homeostasis. Nat Commun. 2021;12(1):470. doi:10.1038/s41467-020-20790-0. PMID 33473109.

3. 3

   Fang T, Han JC, Taberner A, Pham T. MOTS-c in type 2 diabetes mellitus: From risk factors to cardiac complications and potential treatment. Life Sci. 2025;382:124009. doi:10.1016/j.lfs.2025.124009. PMID 41083123.

4. 4

   Santhanam SS, Jayaraman S, Kurian GA. Exogenous MOTS-c mitigates myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury: experimental and in silico evidence from rat heart models. Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2026;399(7):9969-9984. Abstract read 2 August 2026 for the tested range, the route and the reported optimal amount. doi:10.1007/s00210-026-05018-0. PMID 41593376.

5. 5

   ClinicalTrials.gov. A Phase 1a/1b Study of CB4211 in Healthy Non-obese Subjects and Subjects With Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. Sponsor: CohBar, Inc. Record: NCT03998514.

6. 6

   ClinicalTrials.gov, searched for MOTS-c through the registry API on 2 August 2026, HTTP 200, nine records returned. The interventions field of each was read. Eight of the nine list no MOTS-c intervention at all: NCT04013568 and NCT07438002 are exercise interventions, NCT07678073 compares two anesthesia techniques, NCT06500975 is a vestibular implant device study, and NCT04027712, NCT03878706, NCT06133946 and NCT07638696 are observational, the last of them a Ramadan fasting cohort. The ninth is the record withdrawn from this page, described in the correction above.

7. 7

   CohBar, Inc. Second Quarter 2021 financial results and business update, August 10, 2021 (CB4211 phase 1a/1b topline, company-reported, not peer-reviewed). SEC EDGAR, exhibit 99.1.

8. 8

   CohBar, Inc. CohBar Announces CB4211 Phase 1a/1b Results Selected for Late Breaker Presentation at The Liver Meeting 2021. GlobeNewswire, 13 October 2021 (company-reported, not peer-reviewed). Source for the poster's own title, printed there as publication number LP5, session Late-Breaking Abstract Posters: "CB4211, a Novel Analog of MOTS-c, Improves Markers of Liver Injury and Metabolism in Obese Subjects with Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: A Multicenter, Double-Blind, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Study." Retrieved 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. globenewswire.com.

9. 9

   U.S. Food and Drug Administration. July 23-24, 2026 Meeting of the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (MOTS-c bulks-list review, day one): meeting page listing the agenda, the evaluated uses and the posted materials, page content current 22 July 2026, retrieved 29 July 2026, HTTP 200. fda.gov meeting page. The voting questions are in the meeting's own questions document, HTTP 200 the same day.

10. 10

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration. FDA Briefing Document, Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee Meeting, 23 to 24 July 2026: Evaluation of MOTS-c-Related Bulk Drug Substances (MOTS-c free base and MOTS-c acetate). Human safety section, on the absence of clinical studies, human exposure data and adverse event reports; conclusion section, on the criteria weighing against addition to the 503A list. Retrieved 29 July 2026, HTTP 200. Briefing document.

11. 11

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. Guidance for Industry: Estimating the Maximum Safe Starting Dose in Initial Clinical Trials for Therapeutics in Adult Healthy Volunteers. July 2005, Pharmacology and Toxicology. Table 1 for the mouse and rat conversion factors and the 60kg reference weight; section on the algorithm overview for the NOAEL-only input; section on the safety factor for the default value of 10. Nonbinding recommendations, in the document's own words. Retrieved 2 August 2026, HTTP 200. fda.gov guidance page, guidance PDF.

12. 12

    News reporting of the committee vote, not an FDA record. Jacobus N. FDA panel votes to loosen restrictions for four peptides. Pharmaceutical Executive, 24 July 2026, giving MOTS-c at 7 to 5 with two abstentions. pharmexec.com. NBC News, 23 July 2026, giving the same breakdown. nbcnews.com. Both retrieved 29 July 2026, HTTP 200.