In brief
An update of the earlier GHK reviews with an emphasis on gene data. GHK is described as stimulating blood-vessel and nerve outgrowth, increasing collagen, elastin and glycosaminoglycan synthesis, and supporting dermal fibroblasts, with tissue-repair effects reported for skin, lung connective tissue, bone, liver and stomach lining. The authors then list protective actions they attribute to it: anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory activity, lung protection and restoration of fibroblasts from COPD patients, suppression of NF-κB, anti-anxiety, anti-pain and anti-aggression effects, DNA repair and activation of proteasomal clean-up. The argument of the paper is that gene-expression profiling explains how one small molecule could do so many things, by regulating multiple biochemical pathways at once.
Study design
Review of GHK-Cu biology interpreted through gene-expression database analyses; same lead author as the 2015 skin review.
What it does not show
Much of the pathway argument is computational, from comparing GHK's gene-expression signature with databases, rather than from experiments. It is a broad and favourable review by an author with a commercial interest.
A review summarises other papers and inherits every limit of the work it cites. It adds no new experiment, and where a review is written by the group that developed the compound, the selection of what to include is theirs.
Where this paper is cited
- GHK-Cu — Review of GHK-Cu against the Broad Institute gene-expression data: which gene sets it appears to reset.
Other papers cited for GHK-Cu
- Cell-culture study Stimulation of collagen synthesis in fibroblast cultures by the tripeptide-copper complex glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine-Cu2+ Maquart et al. (1988), FEBS Lett
- Review GHK Peptide as a Natural Modulator of Multiple Cellular Pathways in Skin Regeneration Pickart et al. (2015), Biomed Res Int
Further reading
- Research library: every paper cited on this site, by compound and by study type.
- Repair and recovery peptide comparison
- How to read a certificate of analysis
- Lyophilised peptide storage and stability
How this page was made: the citation was retrieved from PubMed by PMID and checked against the title on the product page; the summary was written from the paper's abstract and reports only what the abstract reports. Read the paper itself before relying on any figure here.