Peptide guide

DSIP

Delta sleep-inducing peptide — a nine-amino-acid neuropeptide studied for sleep and stress regulation.

DSIP is a small naturally occurring peptide first pulled from the blood of sleeping rabbits in the 1970s and named for the slow-wave (delta) sleep it seemed to trigger. Fifty years on, its receptor has never been found, its half-life is measured in minutes, and the one rigorous double-blind insomnia trial concluded it wasn't likely to help much. People still use it for sleep and stress, injected before bed. It isn't FDA-approved, the human evidence is small and old, and the practical questions are how to handle it and how not to get scammed buying it.

By the Zapify Research team

Reviewed against 9 clinical & research sources · Updated June 2026 · Educational use only

Type: 9-aa peptideneuropeptide
Route: Subcutaneousbefore bed
Typical dose: 100–300 mcgreported range
Cycle: Time-limitedweeks, not forever
Storage: Mixed: ~4 wksSealed: months
Status: Not FDA-approved

What is DSIP?

A naturally occurring nine-amino-acid peptide (WAGGDASGE) named for delta sleep, yet its receptor was never found and its half-life is only about fifteen minutes.

DSIP stands for delta sleep-inducing peptide. It's a chain of nine amino acids, the same building blocks that make up every protein in your body, with the sequence WAGGDASGE. The molecule is small, and there's nothing exotic behind the name.

The name comes from how it was found. In 1974, Swiss researchers drew blood from rabbits in slow-wave sleep, the deep delta-wave stage, and isolated a substance that seemed to carry that sleep over to other animals. Unlike most peptides sold today, DSIP does occur naturally in the body, turning up in the hypothalamus, limbic system, and other tissues. What it actually does there has stayed stubbornly unclear. Its receptor has never been identified, nobody has pinned down where it's made, and it degrades quickly, with a measured half-life of roughly fifteen minutes.

That gap matters. A compound named for inducing sleep, drawn from sleeping animals, sounds like settled science. The biology underneath it is closer to a fifty-year-old riddle that was never solved.

DSIP isn't FDA-approved for anything. The human evidence is a handful of small, mostly decades-old studies, and the results are mixed at best. In April 2026 the FDA removed DSIP (as emideltide) from its Category 2 restricted list and scheduled it for an advisory-committee review in July 2026 to consider it for the 503A compounding list, but that isn't approval and doesn't authorize compounding yet. Treat it as an experimental research compound, not a proven medicine.

What is it studied for?

The evidence is thin and mostly old animal work; the best human trial (1992, 16 insomniacs) concluded the effect was statistically weak.

Most of the DSIP literature is animal work and small, old human reports. A handful of human studies exist, but they're tiny, several predate modern trial standards, and the most rigorous one undercut the sleep claim rather than supporting it. So the evidence base is thin in a way that's worth seeing clearly before reading anything below.

Evidence base, by subject

Most of the recordAnimal & lab studies

One, negativeControlled human sleep trials

The research has clustered in a few areas:

SleepPromoting slow-wave (delta) sleep, the deepest, most restorative stage. This is the headline use and the source of the name.

Stress & cortisolBlunting the stress response and lowering cortisol in animal models, which is where some of the more interesting signal sits.

Pain & recoveryOlder reports on pain, thermoregulation, and easing opioid and alcohol withdrawal, plus animal work on recovery after injury, mostly uncontrolled.

The mechanism is largely open. The leading idea is that DSIP nudges the brain's sleep and stress circuits, possibly through NMDA receptors and the systems that govern cortisol, but with no identified DSIP receptor and a short time in the blood, how a naturally occurring peptide could produce lasting effects isn't settled. The single best-controlled human trial, a 1992 double-blind study in 16 chronic insomniacs, found slightly higher sleep efficiency and shorter sleep latency on DSIP, then concluded the effect was statistically weak and unlikely to be of major therapeutic benefit. That negative result sits under every sleep claim made for it.

Why people use it

People inject it before bed for deep sleep and stress, but no controlled trial shows it reliably works and the best one concluded it probably wouldn't.

Most people who try DSIP land in one of a few situations. These are the reasons they reach for it, not evidence that it delivers:

Trouble reaching deep sleep specifically, the sense of sleeping a full night and still waking unrefreshed.
Disrupted sleep from shift work, travel, or jet lag, where the goal is resetting rather than knocking themselves out.
Wanting something that targets sleep architecture rather than sedation, on the theory that DSIP works on the body's own delta-sleep machinery.
Running it alongside recovery or stress protocols, on the idea that better deep sleep feeds everything else.

No controlled human trial has shown DSIP reliably improves sleep, and the best one concluded it probably wouldn't. What's there is a real naturally occurring peptide, a long-standing animal signal on slow-wave sleep and cortisol, and a side-effect profile that decades of use describe as mild. It's worth being curious about. It isn't enough to rely on, and it won't replace the basics that actually have evidence behind them: consistent timing, light exposure, cutting late caffeine and alcohol, and a dark, cool room.

How to reconstitute DSIP

Mix a 5 mg vial with 2 mL bacteriostatic water for 2,500 mcg/mL, so 10 units draws 250 mcg; concentration matters since it's dosed in micrograms.

Your vial arrives as a small puck of dry powder. Before you can use it, you mix it into a liquid. That step is called reconstitution, and it's the same process used for most research peptides.

Step 1Start with powderWipe the rubber stopper with an alcohol swab.

Step 2Add bac. waterRun it slowly down the inside wall — never shake.

Step 3Draw your doseThe calculator gives the exact units to draw to.

Wipe the rubber stopper with an alcohol swab first, every time.
Use bacteriostatic water, not plain sterile water and not saline. The trace of benzyl alcohol in it holds back bacteria, which matters because you'll be drawing from the same vial for weeks.
Add the water slowly, running it down the inside glass wall. Don't blast it straight onto the powder.
Don't shake it. Swirl gently and let it dissolve on its own. Shaking foams the solution and can damage the peptide.

DSIP is dosed in micrograms, so concentration matters more here than with milligram-dosed peptides. A common setup is a 5 mg vial mixed with 2 mL of bacteriostatic water, which gives 2,500 mcg/mL. On a U-100 insulin syringe, 10 units is then 250 mcg. The water doesn't change how much peptide is in the vial; it only sets the concentration, which decides how many units you draw. More water means a more dilute mix and a bigger draw for the same dose. You can't ruin it with too much or too little, you only change the draw math, and that's exactly what the calculator handles.

Calculate your exact DSIP reconstitution →

Dose & units

No FDA dose; reports cite about 100–300 mcg (often 100–250) injected once 1–3 hours before sleep, run as a time-limited course rather than nightly.

There is no FDA-approved dose for DSIP. Everything below is a range that clinics and write-ups report, not a medical standard. The recent move off the FDA's Category 2 list doesn't change that; it isn't an approval. Decide what goes into your body with a licensed provider, not with this page.

Typical range

Injected under the skin, the range reported most often runs from about 100 to 300 mcg, with figures around 100–250 mcg the most commonly cited. (A microgram, or mcg, is a thousandth of a milligram.)

Timing

Because the effect is tied to sleep onset and the peptide clears the blood fast, reports describe a single evening dose taken 1 to 3 hours before intended sleep rather than spread through the day.

Cycling

Reports lean toward a time-limited course rather than nightly use without end, but the specifics vary widely: some sources describe a few weeks on followed by a break, others run multi-week cycles with matched off-periods. The spread between sources tells you how soft these numbers are. Starting nearer the low end lets you notice any reaction, including next-day grogginess, before committing to more.

Ona few weeks

Offbreak

For the exact mark to draw to on your insulin syringe, don't eyeball it. The calculator turns your vial size, water, and dose into the precise number of units.

Get your exact units →

Storage

Sealed powder is stable for months at room temperature; once mixed, refrigerate and use within about four weeks.

Sealed & drySealed dry powder stays stable for months at room temperature and shrugs off shipping heat.

ReconstitutedRefrigerate at 2–8 °C and use within about four weeks; don't freeze, keep out of light, discard if cloudy or discolored.

You'll see longer windows quoted for peptide vials. Those figures are beyond-use dates for a sealed, unmixed vial that a compounding pharmacy has stability-tested, and they stop applying the moment you add water. A mixed vial runs on the roughly four-week clock instead, because that's how long the preservative in bacteriostatic water reliably keeps the solution clean once you're drawing from it.

That four-week limit is about sterility, not strength; the peptide itself often stays good well beyond it. Reconstitute with plain sterile water instead of bacteriostatic and you drop to a day or two, since there's no preservative holding bacteria back.

Don't freeze a reconstituted vial, keep it out of direct light, write the mix date on the label, and throw it out if the solution ever turns cloudy or discolored, whatever the date says.

Side effects & safety

Reported effects are mild — mainly next-day grogginess — with no serious human signal; WADA's S0 category sweeps it in, so athletes should treat it as banned.

The reported side effects are generally mild, and decades of scattered use have turned up no serious human signal. That picture comes from small studies and informal reports, not large modern safety trials, so hold it loosely.

Most common: next-day grogginess or a heavy, sluggish feeling on waking, especially at higher doses or with late timing.
Less often: headache, mild dizziness or vertigo, or stomach upset such as nausea.
Occasionally noted: mild redness or irritation at the injection site, and reports of hormonal or mood shifts that aren't well characterized.

Talk to a doctor before starting if you're pregnant, breastfeeding, taking other sleep or psychiatric medication, or managing a serious health condition. DSIP hasn't been studied for those interactions, and a compound that acts on sleep and stress circuits is one to clear with a provider rather than stack blind. The FDA has flagged immunogenicity, the chance the body mounts an immune response to the peptide, as a theoretical concern.

On anti-doping: DSIP isn't named by itself on the WADA Prohibited List, but that doesn't make it cleared for sport. WADA's S0 category sweeps in any substance with no current regulatory approval for human use, which is exactly DSIP's situation, so a competing athlete should treat it as prohibited rather than permitted. That's the same footing as recovery peptides like BPC-157 and TB-500, which also aren't named individually yet fall under the prohibited-substance net. Check the current rules with your sport's anti-doping body before using it.

And the biggest practical risk here isn't really the molecule. It's whether what's in the vial is actually DSIP, at the strength on the label. That comes down to where you buy it.

How to vet a source

With a microgram-dosed peptide a short or off-identity vial is easy to miss, so demand a batch-specific COA and match the lot number to your vial.

This is an unregulated market, and a real share of independently tested vials come back underdosed, impure, or not even the compound on the label. With a microgram-dosed peptide like DSIP, a vial that's short on content or off on identity is easy to miss, since you can't see it in the powder and the effect is subtle to begin with. Where you buy matters more than almost anything else here. The one document that separates a real seller from a gamble is a certificate of analysis: a third-party lab's report on what's actually in the vial.

A real COA shows

An identity test (usually mass spectrometry) confirming the peptide is what the label says.
A purity figure from HPLC, typically 98% or higher.
A lot or batch number that matches the number printed on your vial.
A named, independent accredited lab and a recent test date.

Walk away if

There’s no COA, or it’s a generic image with no lot number.
The “certificate” comes from the seller instead of a third-party lab.
The lot number doesn’t match your vial, or there isn’t one at all.
It’s a flat image you can’t trace back to the lab that issued it.

That's the standard worth holding any seller to, ours included. Ask for the batch-specific COA before you buy, match the lot number to your vial, and don't accept a screenshot in place of a traceable report.

See the Zapify compound catalog →

Common questions about DSIP

Is DSIP approved or proven to work for sleep?

No. It isn't FDA-approved for any use, and the human evidence is small and mixed. The most rigorous study, a 1992 double-blind trial in 16 chronic insomniacs, found only a weak effect on sleep efficiency and latency and concluded DSIP wasn't likely to be of major therapeutic benefit. In April 2026 the FDA removed it (as emideltide) from its Category 2 restricted list and set a July 2026 advisory review to weigh it for the 503A compounding list, but that isn't approval.

If its half-life is only about 15 minutes, how could it affect a whole night's sleep?

Nobody has a settled answer, and that's part of why DSIP is called a riddle. It degrades quickly, with a measured half-life of roughly fifteen minutes, yet it's credited with effects on sleep architecture that would last far longer. The leading guess is that it triggers downstream changes in sleep and stress circuits that outlast the peptide itself, but with no identified receptor, anyone stating the mechanism as settled is guessing.

Is DSIP the same as a sleeping pill?

No, and that's the appeal people cite. Sedatives and most sleep drugs push you toward sleep by dampening the nervous system. DSIP is studied for nudging the body's own slow-wave (delta) sleep, the deep restorative stage, rather than sedating you. Whether it reliably does that in humans is exactly what the evidence hasn't shown.

Does DSIP show up on anti-doping tests?

DSIP isn't named individually on the WADA Prohibited List, but it isn't a free pass either. WADA's S0 category covers any substance with no current regulatory approval for human use, which is DSIP's status, so a competing athlete should treat it as prohibited. Recovery peptides like TB-500 and BPC-157 sit in the same situation. The rules change, contaminated research-grade vials can carry other banned substances, and any athlete should check the current list with their anti-doping body rather than assume.

Why bacteriostatic water and not saline or sterile water?

Because you'll be drawing from the same vial across weeks. Bacteriostatic water carries a trace of benzyl alcohol that holds back bacteria between draws; plain sterile water and saline have no preservative. On a multi-dose peptide vial, the professional sources all point the same way: bacteriostatic.

References

This page is for research and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice or a recommendation to use any compound. The dose ranges shown are reported by clinics and research literature, not validated medical standards, and DSIP is not FDA-approved. Talk to a licensed medical provider about anything you put in your body.