Fight Aging!

This lengthy post covers the topic of setting up and running a self-experiment, a human trial of a single individual, to assess whether a nine month course of injected peptides will significantly and beneficially affect thymus size and cellularity. The thymus atrophies steadily with age. This organ is where maturation of T cells takes place, a complex process of selection to enable T cells to recognize foreign molecule without attacking the body's own component parts. Regrowth of active thymus tissue should improve immune function for the long term by increasing the supply of new T cells, slowing or reversing some of the age-related decline of the immune system.

The peptides in question are three of the Khavinson peptides, the subject of a long-running line of research and development originating in the Russian biomedical community. The original Khavinson peptides were sourced from animal organs, and then over the years synthetic forms were manufactured instead. Some of these natural and synthetic peptides have undergone human trials and have been approved for use as therapies in Russia. The peptides epitalon, thymogen, and vilon have been used to generate animal data to suggest that they improve immune function, at least partially via some degree of regrowth of the aging thymus. But this latter point of thymic regrowth has not been assessed in humans.

The purpose in publishing this outline is not to encourage people to immediately set forth to follow it, though the existing human data for the Khavinson peptides suggests a minimal side-effect profile. If you come away thinking that you should just jump in, and as soon as possible, then you have failed at reading comprehension. This post is intended to illustrate how to think about self-experimentation in this field: set your constraints; identify likely approaches; do the research to fill in the necessary details; establish a plan of action; perhaps try out some parts of it in advance, such as the measurement portions, as they never quite work as expected; and most importantly identify whether or not the whole plan is worth actually trying, given all that is known of the risks involved. Ultimately that must be a personal choice.

Contents

• Why Self-Experiment with Methods of Thymic Regrowth?
• Caveats in More Detail
• Summarizing the Use of Thymus-Relevant Khavinson Peptides
• Establishing Dosage
• An Introduction to Injections
• Considering Autoinjectors
• Obtaining a Needle-Free Injection System
• Obtaining Vials of the Correct Size
• Preparing Khavinson Peptides for Injection
• Obtaining Khavinson Peptides
• Storing Khavinson Peptides
• Validating the Purchased Peptides
• Establishing Tests and Measures
• Guesstimated Costs
• Practice Before Working with Peptides
• Schedule for the Self-Experiment
• Where to Publish?

Why Self-Experiment with Methods of Thymic Regrowth?

Thymic involution with age, the process of atrophy that replaces active thymic tissue with fat, is an important contributing cause of immune system aging. The thymus plays a vital role: thymocytes created in the bone marrow migrate to the thymus, where they mature through a complex process of selection in order to become T cells of the adaptive immune system. As active thymic tissue atrophies, the supply of new T cells diminishes. This lack of continued reinforcements leads to an aged adaptive immune system that is ever more populated by exhausted, senescent, and malfunctioning T cells.

Notably, the decline of the immune system is slow. The thymus loses 1% of its active tissue with each passing year of adult life, and is near all fat by the time most individuals are in their 50s. The adaptive immune system takes another decade after that to become notably problematic. Given a way to wholly replenish the T cell complement of the adaptive immune system, one could likely gain an additional decade of function. Equally, regrowing 10% of the original youthful thymic tissue would also likely gain about a decade of additional immune function. Given the great importance of the immune system to health, a restored thymus seems a goal worthy of pursuit.

Caveats in More Detail

There are two areas of personal responsibility to consider here. Firstly, this self-experiment involves injecting peptides that, while having a fair amount of use outside the US and in self-experimenter communities, come with comparatively little easily accessible primary sources of published human data. Much of that data is actually quite challenging to access, being both dated and from the Russian medical community, so the only English language references are in the form of reviews that describe only the outline of an earlier study. So while the materials that can be reviewed suggest a good safety profile, it is more of a leap into the unknown than is experimenting with compounds that have gone through clinical trials in the English-language world and where the primary sources are easily accessible.

Secondly, obtaining peptides in the manner described here is potentially illegal: not yet being a formally registered medical treatment, it falls into a nebulous area of regulatory and prosecutorial discretion as to which of the overly broad rules and laws might apply. In effect it is illegal if one of the representatives of the powers that be chooses to say it is illegal in any specific case, and there are few good guidelines as to how those decisions will be made. The clearest of the murky dividing lines is that it is legal to use peptides that are not defined as a therapy for research use, but illegal to market and sell them for personal use in most circumstances. This is very selectively enforced, however, and reputable sellers simply declare that their products are not for personal use, while knowing full well that this is exactly what their customers are doing in many cases.

Summarizing the Use of Thymus-Relevant Khavinson Peptides

Most of the primary research materials relating to Khavinson peptides are largely in Russian, and largely not available online. The book Peptides in the Epigenetic Control of Aging provides a decent summary of the peptides and what has been done with them, but lacks many of the specifics that would be provided in the original clinical trial materials and study papers. There are 16 Khavinson peptides, derived from different organ tissues, and claimed to have numerous beneficial effects in aged individuals, but only three are of interest for animal data suggesting an effect on the thymus, or an increase in life span, or both. These are epitalon (derived from pineal gland tissue peptide extracts called epithalamin), thymogen (derived from thymus tissue peptide extracts called thylamin), and vilon (also derived from thylamin). While the details are not well understood, evidence tentatively suggests cross-talk between the pineal gland and thymus, and an involvement for pineal signaling in thymic involution.

Epitalon and vilon been claimed to extend life in rodents, while thymogen has been claimed to be geroprotective in rodents. Researchers have reported lower cancer incidence in treated mice. Further evidence suggests benefits to immune function, but the claimed benefits to health are very broad, including reduced incidence of many different diseases. Similar reports exist for the animal organ extracts epithalamin and thylamin from which the more modern Khavinson peptides are derived. Near all of this is from Russian scientific literature, or from old literature that is not fully available online, or from second-hand reports of the same, so should be taken as less robust than would otherwise be the case. A great deal is claimed, and these peptides have been used in human trials, but such claims are by no means as rigorously proven as would be the case if the English-language regulators had been involved, or the work carried out more recently.

Establishing Dosage

The Khavinson peptides have been used orally and via subcutaneous or intramuscular injection. The latter path should provide a greater bioavailability of the peptide. In the reported animal studies, doses vary widely. Where human trials are discussed, there are more useful examples. For example, "Peptides of pineal gland and thymus prolong human life", published in 2003 and hard to find online, reports a trial in which patients underwent intermittent 10 day courses of injections of 10mg per day of thymlamin or epithalamin. The intervals between courses were 6-12 months, with a trial duration of up to 3 years, with 5 years of following observation. Vilon, thymogen, and other later synthetic Khavinson peptides have similarly been reported to have undergone a variety of human trials.

After looking through the unfortunately sparse literature, the dose selected for this self-experiment is 10mg epitalon, 10mg thymogen, and 10mg vilon daily. That dose is to be split between two intramuscular or intravenous injections, carried out 12 hours apart (morning and evening). That dose schedule is repeated for 10 consecutive days, once every 3 months, for 9 months. This choice is aimed to (a) not go too far beyond what has been done in terms of a single injected dose at any one time to minimize the risk of side-effects, while (b) providing a sufficiently high dose and intensive schedule to argue, should no increase in thymus cellularity be observed, that this failure was not due to using too small a dose or too sparse a dose schedule.

An Introduction to Injections

The relationship between different forms of injection, dosage, and effects is actually a complicated and surprisingly poorly mapped topic. There are four type of injection to consider, here listed in descending order of difficulty to carry out safely: (a) intraperitoneal, through the stomach muscle into the abdominal body cavity, which is rare in human medicine but common in studies using small animals; (b) intravenous, into a vein, which requires some practice to get right; (c) intramuscular, into the muscle beneath the skin; and (d) subcutanous, into the lower levels of the skin.

The amount of fluid that can be easily injected varies by type. In humans, effectively unlimited amounts of fluid can be introduced via intraperitoneal or intravenous injection. The subcutaneous route is limited to something less than 1 ml, and intramuscular is limited to 2-3 ml depending on location. These are all very fuzzy numbers, but these upper limits don't really matter for the purposes of injecting 10 μg of a protein: it can be dissolved in a very small amount of liquid, 0.5 ml or less.

Different injection routes can alter the character of the injected medicine; how much is required to gain a given effect, how long it takes to get into the system and how fast it does it. A rare few types of medication cannot be injected subcutaneously, because the metabolism of the skin will degrade them, while some are better given subcutaneously. If you root through the literature looking for comparisons between performance and dosage for different injection types, you'll find a very ragged collection of examples showing that there are few coherent rules. Some compounds have no discernible differences between injection route, some see altered peaks of concentration, some require higher doses when subcutaneous, some require lower doses when subcutenous. Oil-based solutions can produce a very slow uptake of medication when injected into muscle or skin in comparison to an intraveous injection, while water-based solutions result in just as rapid an uptake into the bloodstream.

It seems sensible to say that a self-experimenter should try to use the much easier paths of subcutaneous and intramuscular injection, and just keep the same dose as was established for intravenous injection. For most people, intraveous injections require a helper or a lot of painful practice. For subcutaneous and intramuscular injections, there is a market of autoinjection tools that can remove many of the challenges inherent in managing injections. In the case of flagellin, it makes sense to stick with the human trial approach of intramuscular injections.

Considering Autoinjectors

Sticking a needle into one's own flesh is not an easy thing to do, and this is the rationale for the range of autoinjection systems that have been developed by the medical community. They are most easily available for subcutaneous injections; spring-based devices that accept a standard needle and syringe, and that are trigged by a button push. Intramuscular autoinjectors do exist, but unfortunately largely not in a general or easily available way. All of the needle-based intramuscular autoinjectors are regulated devices that come preloaded with a particular medicine, and are not otherwise sold in a more generally useful way. Unfortunately, there is no automation that can help with intravenous injections. You are on your own there.

Option 1: Subcutaneous Autoinjection with Needle and Syringe

If intending to carry out subcutaneous injections it is easy enough to order up a supply of disposible needles and syringes, an autoinjector device that accepts the standard needle and syringe arrangement, and other necessary items such as sterilization equipment from the sizable diabetes-focused marketplace. Such injections are relatively easy to carry out, a wide range of vendors sell the materials, and there is a lot of documentation, including videos, available on how to carry out subcutaneous injections. All of the equipment is cheap. Buying these materials will probably put you on a list in this era of the drug war, but there are many people out there doing it.

Option 2: Subcutaneous or Intramuscular Needle-Free Autoinjection

Are there viable alternatives to needles? As it turns out, yes, and some can solve the problem of missing general intramuscular autoinjectors as well. Needle-free autoinjectors that use a thin, high-pressure fluid jet to punch medication through the skin are a growing area of development. These systems have numerous advantages over needles, but they are more expensive, most can only manage subcutanous injections, and all are limited in the amount of fluid they can inject in comparison to the traditional needle and syringe. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this outline, I'll focus on needle-free systems. The biggest, primary, and most attractive advantage of a needle-free system is in the name: it means not having to deal with needles in any way, shape, or form.

Obtaining a Needle-Free Injection System

There are a fair number of needle-free injectors on the market, but most are hard to obtain unless you happen to be a regulated medical facility running through the standard regulated purchase model, and are looking for large numbers of units in a bulk purchase. Some systems use compressed gas, others use springs. The spring-based systems tend to be less complicated and more reliable. From my survey of the marketplace, the two systems worth looking at are (a) PharmaJet, which can be purchased in the US via intermediary suppliers, and (b) Comfort-in, which is sold directly to consumers in most countries by an Australian group. When initially looking at the market a few years ago, PharmaJet was the only available needle-free system capable of intramuscular rather than subcutaneous injection.

PharmaJet is the better engineered and more expensive of these two systems, and its specialized 0.5 ml syringes are built to be one-use only. Further, loading fluid into the syringes requires the use of vials and a vial adaptor. First the vial is loaded with the fluid to be injected, then the vial is connected to the syringe via the adaptor to transfer the fluid. Comfort-in has a similar setup, but is more flexible, and on the whole more consumer-friendly when considering the entire package of injector and accessories. It is has a wider range of vial and other adaptors. Further, the Comfort-in syringes can in principle be reused given sterilization, though of course that is not recommended.

The instructions for both of these systems are extensive, and include videos. They are fairly easy to use. One caveat is that needle-free systems produce a puncture that more readily leaks injected material back out again than is the case for needles. It is a good idea to have a less absorbent plaster ready to apply immediately after injection, such as one of the hydrocolloid dressings now widely available in stores.

Obtaining Vials of the Correct Size

If using the insulin needle and subcutaneous injection approach, then any variety of capped glass vial will do when it comes to mixing and temporarily holding liquids for injection. It does, however help greatly to either use preassembled sterile vials or assemble your own vials with rubber stoppers and crimped caps, as described below, as that sort of setup makes it easier to take up small amounts of a liquid into a syringe. If using the needle-free systems, then vials of a specific type and size are necessary in order to fit the adaptors. The rest of this discussion focuses on that scenario.

There are many, many different types of vial manufactured for various specialized uses in the laboratory. The type needed here is (a) crimp-top vial, also called serum vials by some manufacturers, with (b) a 13mm (for PharmaJet and Comfort-in) or 20mm (for Comfort-in only) diameter open top aluminium cap, one that has a central hole to allow needles and adaptor spikes through, and (c) a rubber or rubber-like stopper that is thin enough in the center to let a needle or adaptor spike past. The cap is crimped on over the rubber seal to keep everything in place - this requires a crimping tool, and removing it requires the use of another tool.

There are two options here. The first option is to purchase preassembled empty sterile vials of the right size and a set of disposable needles and syringes to transfer liquid into the vials. In order to continue to bypass the whole business of needles, however, the other alternative is to purchase vials, stoppers, and aluminium caps separately, or in a kit, and assemble your own vials. A crimping tool is also needed in order to seal the cap. That tool, like the vials and the caps, must be of the right size. Be careful when purchasing online. Vials are categorized by many different dimensions, and descriptions tend to mix and match which dimensions of the vial they are discussing, or omit the important ones. For sterile vials, it is usually only the cap diameter that is mentioned. For crimp-top vials, there are any number of dimensions that might be discussed; the one that needs to match the cap diameter is the outer diameter of the mouth or crimp.

It is usually a good idea to buy a kit where possible, rather than assembling the pieces from different orders, but if taking the assembly path, it is best to buy all the pieces from the same company. Wheaton is a decent manufacturer, and it is usally possible to find much of their equipment for sale via numeous vendors. One can match, say, the crimp-top 3ml vials #223684 with 7mm inner mouth and 13mm outer mouth with snap-on rubber stoppers #224100-080 of the appropriate dimensions and 13mm open top caps #224177-01. Then add a 13mm crimping device #W225302 and pliers #224372 to remove 13mm crimped caps.

Preparing Khavinson Peptides for Injection

If using a needle-free injection system, you will likely be limited to injecting 0.5ml amounts. The objective here is to produce doses of the peptides dissolved in 0.5 ml of phosphate buffered saline in sealed vials, ready to be used with the injection system, with as little contamination as possible from the environment, and stored a freezer until it is ready to use. Depending on the size of the vial, it might be able to contain doses for multiple injections, but it is better to stick to one dose per vial. Peptides are sensitive to free-thaw cycles, so you want as few of those as possible.

When ordering epitalon, thymogen, and vilon, they will arrive as lyophilized (freeze-dried) crystals or powder. Thymogen must be shipped on ice, as it is not very stable at room temperature. (a) Divide the lyophized peptides into 100mg amounts, and place into a freezer. (b) Every month pull out 100mg of each peptide, and dissolve all three 100mg amounts into the same 10ml of phosphate buffered saline, with the addition of five drops of DMSO to aid in solubility. Thymogen is a very light, fine powder, and 10ml is right on the edge of what is required to dissolve 100mg. You may see a few flecks remaining. (c) Split the 10ml solution into 20 vials of 0.5ml each. This is a lot of precision pipetting, so practice first! (d) Seal the vials and place them into the freezer, for use in injections that month.

Keeping Things Sterile is Very Important

Keeping hands, tools, vials, and surfaces clean and sterile is important: wash everything carefully and wipe down surfaces with an alcohol solution before and after use. Laboratories use autoclaves, which sterilize with steam. These are largely expensive devices, but a range of smaller, cheaper options exists. There are many best practices guides and summaries available online. This extends to the injection itself. Even with needle-free systems, an injection site should still be wiped down with alcohol first. It is all too easy to infect an injection site if skipping the precautions, and this can have unfortunate consequences.

Obtaining Khavinson Peptides

A number of peptide vendors worldwide sell epitalon, the most popular of the Khavinson peptides. A much smaller number keep a stock of thymogen and vilon. Most reputable peptide manufacturers could also run up a custom order, but that is much more expensive. An advantage of the companies that advertise epitalon, thymogen, and vilon in their catalog is that they will have established mass spectra and other data sheets for the compound that can be compared with one another, or used as a basis for evaluating the quality of the product. Prices are often outrageous, however. Chinese companies, on the other hand, have a comparatively low price for their offerings, significant lower than that of even the most aggressively competitive companies in the US and Europe. Among European and US synthesis companies out there, Pepscan and Genscript are options, with Genscript recommended by a number of sources.

Without focusing on any of the specific vendors mentioned above, the easiest way to obtain cost-effective synthesis of peptides is to find and connect with smaller-sized suppliers in China. There are a good many reputable peptide synthesis concerns in that part of the world. Sadly, finding such companies has become great deal more challenging, since Alibaba removed all such commerce from their platform in 2021.

As noted at the outset of this post, all of these efforts to obtain, ship, and use any random protein for self-experimentation are to some degree illegal - it would be an act of civil disobedience carried out because the laws regarding these matters are unjust, albeit very unevenly enforced. Many people regularly order pharmaceuticals from overseas, with and without prescriptions, for a variety of economic and medical reasons, and all of this is illegal. The usual worst outcome for individual users is intermittent confiscation of goods by customs, though in the US, the FDA is actually responsible for this enforcement rather than the customs authorities. Worse things can and have happened to individuals, however, even though enforcement is usually targeted at bigger fish, those who want to resell sizable amounts of medication on the gray market, or who are trafficking in controlled substances. While the situation with an arbitrary protein isn't the same from a regulatory perspective, there is a fair amount written on the broader topic online, and I encourage reading around the subject.

Open a Business Mailbox

A mailbox capable of receiving signature-required packages from internal shipping concerns such as DHL and Fedex will be needed. Having a business name and address is a good idea. Do not use a residential address.

Finding Overseas Manufacturers

It used to be the case that Alibaba was the primary means for non-Chinese-language purchasers to connect to Chinese manufacturers of peptides and other compounds. Unfortunately, the company banned all such manufacturers from their marketplace as of mid-2021, for reasons that have not yet become clear. Reputable manufacturers exist in China and other countries, but finding them is now more of an exercise without an initial set of connections to work from. Smaller companies are desired, as larger companies will tend to (a) ignore individual purchasers in search of small amounts of a protein, for all the obvious economic reasons, and (b) in any case require proof of all of the necessary importation licenses and paperwork. Shop around for prices - they may vary widely, and it isn't necessarily the case that very low prices indicate a scam of some sort. Some items and services are genuinely very cheap to obtain via some Chinese sources. Remember to ask the manufacturer for mass spectra and liquid chromatography data if they have it.

Chinese manufacturers are familiar with international shipping practices. On their own initiative may or may not decide to declare the true cost and contents of the shipped package. This is another form of widely practiced civil disobedience, but is much more common in the shipping of pharmaceuticals than in the shipping of synthesized proteins. The former are likely to be confiscated by customs officials, while the latter are not. If the true cost is declared, then expect to pay customs duty on that cost; payment is typically handled via the carrier. Note that different carriers tend to have different processes and rates at which shipments are checked for validity.

Storing Khavinson Peptides

Peptides are commonly shipped in a solid freeze-dried (lyophilised) form. While in this form they are easily stored in a refrigerator for the short-term or in a freezer for the long term. Some are fairly stable at room temperature in this state, and some are not - it varies widely from peptide to peptide. A peptide has a much shorter life span once it has been mixed with liquid for injection, and should be kept frozen, used within a matter of a few months at the most, and not subject to repeated freeze-thaw cycles.

Validating the Purchased Peptides

A peptide may have been ordered, but that doesn't mean that what turns up at the door is either the right one or free from impurities or otherwise of good quality. Even when not ordering from distant, infrequent suppliers, regular testing of batches is good practice in any industry. How to determine whether a protein is what it says it is on the label? Run it through a process of liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, and compare the results against the standard data for a high purity sample of that compound. Or rather pay a small lab company to do that.

At one point, Science Exchange was a fairly robust way to identify providers of specific lab services, request quotes, and make payments. Unfortunately, their service is now expensive and restricted to industry. Thus we must fall back on more laborious approaches to finding small laboratory service companies or university core services to work with. Large companies will want all of the boilerplate registrations and legalities dotted and crossed, and are generally a pain to deal with in most other ways as well. Rates vary, but $200 per sample is a fair price for LC-MS to check the identity and purity of a compound.

Certainly ask if you have questions; most providers are happy to answer questions for someone less familiar with the technologies used. Service providers will typically want a description of the compounds to be tested and their standard data sheets, as a matter of best practice and safety. Here provide the mass spectra and other data sheets from the vendor, or use those published by other sources. Finding those sources through PubChem is not hard for more widely used compounds.

Ship the sample via a carrier service such as DHL, UPS, or FedEx. Some LC-MS service companies may provide shipping instructions or recommendations. These are usually some variety of common sense: add a description and invoice to the package; reference the order ID, sender, and receiver; clearly label sample containers; and package defensively with three layers of packing; and so forth.

Once the LC-MS process runs, the lab company should provide a short summary regarding whether or not the compound is in fact the correct one and numbers for the estimated purity. Also provided are the mass spectra, which can be compared with the existing spectra from the vendor or other sources.

Establishing Tests and Measures

There are a few options for testing before and after effects of an intervention that may provoke the regrowth of active thymus tissue, and thereby increase the production of T cells.

CT Scan

The most direct approach is to undergo a CT scan of the chest, with the aid of a cooperative physician, and obtain a copy of the imaging data to work with. There are a number of freely available viewers for scan data, such as Gingko CADx. The thymus is clearly identifiable in such scans, and one can perform manual or pixel-counting analysis to get some idea as to whether cellularity or size has changed. In humans, the imagery provided in the Intervene Immune trial results suggest that changes in cellularity and thus density are the more likely outcome than any growth in size. It will require some reading around the literature in order to understand the CT images one obtains from a provider. There are a number of useful papers containing sample images from individuals at various stages of thymic involution. See "Normal CT characteristics of the thymus in adults" for example.

Monocyte to Leukocyte Ratio

The monocyte to leukocyte ratio should be altered towards an increased number of leukocytes if T cell production by the thymus is upregulated. This ratio can be obtained from the counts provided in normal bloodwork. There exist online services such as WellnessFX where one can order up a blood test and then head off the next day to have it carried out by one of the widely available clinical service companies. Though note that some US states require the involvement of a physician!

Naive T Cell and Recent Thymic Emigrant T Cell Counts

Given a cooperative physician who is knowledgable regarding immunology, it should be possible to order tests that count (a) naive T cells and (b) recent thymic emigrants, T cells with characteristics that fade within a few weeks of leaving the thymus. Both populations should be increased by a more active thymus. These are less common, more expensive assays, but are more compelling than a monocyte to leukocyte ratio measure.

Guesstimated Costs

The costs given here are rounded up for the sake of convenience, and in some cases are blurred median values standing in for the range of observed prices in the wild. The choice to use needles for subcutaneous injection is obviously much cheaper than exploring the world of needle-free injections and vial assembly.

• Baseline bloodwork for monocyte and leukocyte counts from WellnessFX: $220 / test
• Naive T cell assay via a medical provider: $1500+ / test
• Recent thymic emigrant assay via a medical provider: $1500+ / test
• CT scan: $1000 / scan
• Business mailbox, such as from UPS: $250 / year
• Miscellenous equipment: spatulas, labels, vials, a vial rack, etc: $60
• Phosphate buffered saline and DMSO: $100
• Small pack of 13mm sterile serum vials: $35
• PharmaJet Needle-free Injection Kit: $1020
• Comfort-in Needle-free Injection Kit: $470
• Bulk 13mm serum vial parts and capping tools: $750
• 100mg of each of epitalon, thymogen, and vilon from Chinese peptide manufacturers: $600
• Shipping and LC-MS analysis of samples: $600

Practice Before Working with Peptides

Do you think you can reliably pipette fluid in 0.5ml amounts between small vials? Or cap vials or connect adaptors or fill syringes or carry out an injection without messing it up somewhere along the way? Perhaps you can. But it is a very good idea to practice first with saline solution rather than finding out that your manual dexterity and methods are lacking while handling an expensive protein. You will doubtless come to the conclusion that more tools or different tools are needed than was expected to be the case.

Schedule for the Self-Experiment

One might expect the process of discovery, reading around the topic, ordering materials, and validating an order of peptides to take a couple of months. During that process, also obtain the baseline assessments such as CT scan. Once all of the decisions are made and the materials are in hand, pick a start date. The self-experiment will last for 9 months, with 10 days of twice-daily injections every 3 months. On each injection day, space the injections 12 hours apart. After completion of the self-experiment, rerun the selected assays.

Where to Publish?

If you run a self-experiment and keep the results to yourself, then you helped only yourself. The true benefit of rational, considered self-experimentation only begins to emerge when many members of community share their data, to an extent that can help to inform formal trials and direction of research and development. There are numerous communities of people whose members self-experiment with various compounds and interventions, with varying degrees of rigor. One can be found at the LongeCity forums, for example, and that is a fair place to post the details and results of a personal trial. Equally if you run your own website or blog, why not there?

When publishing, include all of the measured data, the doses taken, duration of treatment, and age, weight, and gender. Fuzzing age to a less distinct five year range (e.g. late 40s, early 50s) is fine. If you wish to publish anonymously, it should be fairly safe to do so, as none of that data can be traced back to you without access to the bloodwork provider. None of the usual suspects will be interested in going that far. Negative results are just as important as positive results! Publish whatever the outcome.