Longevity and bioregulators

Pinealon

Its main review's two human claims lead to a review and a patent

7 sections

Top of article
What it actually is
What it is supposed to do
What people take it for
The dose question
How to check you have the right molecule
What people get wrong
What is known about harm

What circulates: 5 to 10 mg a day injected, or 10 to 20 mg swallowed
What was studied: 200 mcg a day, swallowed, for two weeks
The gap: Convention runs above the studied dose
How long it lasts: No figure has been published that I could find. I found no measurement of how much of it is absorbed, how long it lasts in the body, or what fraction of a dose ever reaches the blood, in any species. Khavinson's own 2022 review on how these very short peptides are carried into cells proposes transport routes and reports no such measurement.

What it actually is

Pinealon is a lab made chain of three amino acids, the small building blocks proteins are made of. Short chains like this are called peptides. Its three are glutamic acid, aspartic acid and arginine, written Glu-Asp-Arg. It is sold as a pineal gland compound, and its inventors say it was lifted out of Cortexin, a mixture extracted from the brain cortex of cattle, which is a different organ from the one the name points at. In Russia it is sold as capsules, and by its own label it is a food supplement rather than a medicine.

What it is supposed to do

The claim made for it is epigenetic, meaning it is about which genes get switched on rather than about a molecule docking onto a receptor. The peptide is said to bind DNA and change what the cell reads off it. The only result I found from a group outside that Russian research network is a physics experiment, which showed the molecule can partly slip into the major groove of DNA, the wider of the two spiral channels running along the strand, in a tube. That is a molecule touching DNA in glassware, and it says nothing about whether a gene changed in a person.

What people take it for

It is sold as an antioxidant, and free radicals are what every vendor page I opened leads with. The human material is about the after effects of head injury, which is what the 2020 review's 72 patient claim and the 25 patient patent study concern, and about measures of what the authors call biological age, which is what the published locomotive crew paper reported. That is what it is sold and written about for, not what it has been shown to do, and the one human paper I found that went looking reported the opposite of an antioxidant effect.

The dose question

What circulates: 5 to 10 mg a day injected, or 10 to 20 mg swallowed
What was studied: 200 mcg a day, swallowed, for two weeks; Nazimko 2012, one 100 mcg capsule twice a day in locomotive crew, no participant count given

Above the studied dose

The swallowed convention is a hundred times the one human amount I found in a published paper, on the same route: 200 micrograms a day against a vendor top end of 20 milligrams. The injected convention matches one published human figure only, and it is the 5 milligram arm reserved for the most severely injured in a ten day study I found inside a patent, whose mildest arm got 1 microgram. I found no page tracing its milligram figure to any study, and one says outright that the number was shaped by the product format and community habit rather than by a dose response trial.

Reported because it is what people use. Nothing here recommends any amount.

How long it lasts

No figure has been published that I could find. I found no measurement of how much of it is absorbed, how long it lasts in the body, or what fraction of a dose ever reaches the blood, in any species. Khavinson's own 2022 review on how these very short peptides are carried into cells proposes transport routes and reports no such measurement.

Route studied

Swallowed as capsules, one 100 microgram capsule twice a day for two weeks, in the only published paper I found that names a route. The 25 patient study printed inside the patent injected it into the muscle once a day for ten days. The animal work injected it into the belly cavity, which is a laboratory route and not one a person uses.

Route used

Injected under the skin, or swallowed. That is what the protocol pages list, not observed use. No human paper I found describes an injection, and the one that names a route used capsules.

How to check you have the right molecule

This entry publishes three numbers to hold a laboratory report against. The sequence should read Glu-Asp-Arg, three amino acids and no more. The weight should come back at about 418.40. The registry number is 175175-23-2, and PubChem files it as entry 10273502. The second check is the label. The Russian retail capsule declares a peptide complex called AC-5 and then lists arginine, glutamic acid and aspartic acid, which are the three amino acids loose, with no sequence and no microgram figure anywhere on it, so I could not confirm from that label that the capsule holds the assembled three amino acid chain at all.

Walked through on two real certificates in how to read a certificate of analysis.

What people get wrong

Two things get mixed up, and they stack. The first is the gland. The name reads as a pineal compound and it is filed next to Epithalon on that basis, while its inventors say it was taken from an extract of cattle brain cortex, and in the one rat pineal gland culture I found that tested both, the peptide reported to move the pineal markers was Epithalon and not this one. The second is what stands behind the human numbers. The main English language review of it makes two claims about people, and following its own citations leads to another review and to a patent, so a reader who expects a trial report does not find one.

What is known about harm

The human safety record I found is one paragraph in one paper, and both signals in it point the wrong way for something sold as an antioxidant: the peptide acting as a prooxidant on a light emission test, and a fall in a blood stem cell marker called CD34 that the authors read as suppressed blood cell production. That study gave a second peptide alongside and described no control group, so nothing in it is attributable to this one alone. The same abstract also reports no effect on how tightly the DNA was packed inside the cell nucleus, which those authors called safe at the genetic level. All the animal toxicology I found sits inside the patent, written by the applicants and never peer reviewed, and I found no human safety data at all for the injected route at the amounts sellers list.

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