ARA-290 common uses, half-life, side effects and more

ARA-290 is an 11 amino acid peptide copied from one face of erythropoietin's helix B. Its designers picked the part of the molecule that points away from the receptor. That choice was meant to keep erythropoietin's tissue-repair signaling without driving red blood cell production. Trials tested it for nerve pain in sarcoidosis and in diabetes. People buy it through research-chemical channels for neuropathy and chronic pain. No country has approved it for anything. The company that developed it has been silent since 2015.

• Nerve pain from small fiber neuropathy
• Sarcoidosis-related neuropathic symptoms
• Diabetic nerve pain and related complications
• Chronic pain and inflammation more broadly
• Investigational use in eye and kidney injury

Once daily in trials

Trials used 4 mg under the skin once daily for 28 days. The one long first-hand account found runs about 400 mcg daily for five months. That is roughly a tenth of the trial dose. Cost probably explains the gap because a 28 day course at the trial dose would need about seven vials. A pilot trial gave 2 mg intravenously three times a week. No settled community convention exists.

• Vials run 10 to 20 mg and reconstitute with bacteriostatic water
• Real-world use runs far below the trial dose and far longer than any trial
• Cycling has no basis either way because the trials ran 28 days straight

Plasma half-life is about 20 minutes after injection under the skin. The developers' own review gives about 2 minutes for intravenous dosing. No primary human pharmacokinetic study has ever been published and both figures trace to the same unindexed review.

• Headache as the largest gap between drug and placebo in trial data
• Nausea reported by roughly one in nine on the drug and by nobody on placebo
• Fatigue and wooziness in the hours after a dose
• Suicidal ideation in one person at the highest dose tested
• Injection site pain that occurred more often on placebo than on the drug

ARA-290 is thought to act on a receptor built from two different subunits. One comes from the erythropoietin receptor and the other is shared with several immune signals. That pairing has never been solved structurally. An independent group tested whether the two subunits associate in the presence of this peptide and could not detect any specific interaction. Other laboratories have forced the two together artificially and shown the combination can signal. That supports the idea without confirming this peptide assembles it. Missing the receptor-contact face of erythropoietin is the structural reason it should not drive red cell production. Human trials found no sign that it does.

Four published human trials enrolled fewer than 200 people in total and almost all ran 28 days. Every trial that measured pain, function, vision, or mood failed to beat placebo. The only positive results were nerve-imaging surrogates. The largest trial hit its imaging endpoint at one dose out of three and the highest dose missed. Placebo did better than every drug arm on the standard nerve fiber density measure. All four trials carry the sponsor's authorship and three appeared in a journal whose masthead lists the sponsor's co-founder. Two supporting animal papers have been retracted for image problems and one of those retractions came in 2026. The developer registered a single trial and has been dormant since 2015.

• Nobody has measured hematocrit, blood pressure, or clotting markers in any published trial
• Serious adverse events in the largest trial all occurred on the drug and none on placebo
• Cancer risk is untested because the trials excluded anyone with a recent malignancy
• Prohibited in sport under the innate repair receptor category
• Pregnancy and breastfeeding safety is unstudied and the trials required contraception
• Only nine people have ever been followed past 28 days