Peptides for cognition and IQ: what the science actually says

What did @bio.science actually say?

The creator told their 84K viewers to ditch C-MAX entirely, calling it ineffective for focus, plasticity, and learning. They rattled off a list of alternatives — TAK, BPN 14770, ASP4345, AF710B, tropisetron, sarcosine, intranasal insulin, inulin, roxadustat, and something called ACD — framing them as straightforwardly better options. They also threw in a warning: "don't do it, it's stupid" about sarcosine specifically. The whole thing clocked in under two minutes, with no dosing context, no safety caveats, and no acknowledgment that most of these compounds have never been tested in healthy humans.

The confidence here is worth noting. This isn't a researcher hedging on early-phase data. This is a TikTok creator telling tens of thousands of people to swap one poorly-studied compound for a list of others, some of which are investigational drugs that never made it past phase 2 trials.

Does the science back this up?

Partially, in narrow ways — but the framing is dangerously oversimplified. BPN 14770, a PDE4D inhibitor, does have legitimate preclinical and early human data for cognitive enhancement, including a 2020 phase 1 trial published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology (Burgin et al., 2020). ASP4345, a dopamine D1 receptor positive allosteric modulator, showed some working memory signals in a 2021 phase 2 trial in schizophrenia patients — not healthy biohackers. AF710B is a muscarinic M1/sigma-1 receptor agonist with mouse-model Alzheimer's data (Fisher et al., 2016, Translational Psychiatry). None of these have established safety profiles in healthy adult recreational use. Intranasal insulin has real research behind it for cognition (Benedict et al., 2011, Nature Reviews Neuroscience), but recommending it casually alongside "inulin" and "roxadustat" in the same breath is where things fall apart fast.

What did they get wrong (or right)?

Credit where it's due: the skepticism toward C-MAX is reasonable. C-MAX (presumably a nootropic stack product) has essentially no peer-reviewed pharmacological backing, and dismissing it as a "placebo experience" is probably fair for most commercial formulations. The concern about sarcosine — a glycine transporter 1 inhibitor that modulates NMDA receptors — being used carelessly is also not baseless; NMDA modulation carries real risks including dissociation and excitotoxicity at the wrong end of the dose-response curve.

But the errors are significant. Roxadustat is a HIF prolyl-hydroxylase inhibitor approved in some countries for anemia from chronic kidney disease. Recommending it for "plasticity" in healthy people is not supported by any published evidence and carries cardiovascular risk signals flagged in its clinical development program. Calling these compounds "rather basic" is false. They are not basic. They are investigational or repurposed drugs with incomplete human safety data. The creator also conflates mechanistic plausibility with clinical evidence throughout, which is a meaningful distinction that never gets made.

What should you actually know?

Almost every compound named in this video sits in one of three categories: investigational drugs tested only in disease populations, animal-model compounds with no human trial data, or repurposed drugs whose use for cognitive enhancement in healthy people is entirely off-label with unknown risk profiles. "Better" is doing a lot of work in this video without a single citation to support it.

Intranasal insulin is the one compound here with a real human evidence base for cognition, but even that literature involves controlled research protocols — not self-administration at home. The broader pattern of this video, presenting a confident substitution list for a poorly-evidenced compound, is itself a version of the same problem it claims to solve. Swapping one under-studied compound for five more under-studied ones is not harm reduction. Anyone considering any of these compounds should be working with a clinician who can review their individual health status, not taking cues from a two-minute TikTok.