Glossary
Khavinson bioregulator
Also written short peptide bioregulator, peptide bioregulator, Khavinson peptide
A family of very short peptides from one St Petersburg institute, each assigned to a different organ, on the claim that they act directly on DNA rather than through a receptor.
The mechanism is what makes the family distinctive, and it is also what makes it hard to accept. These peptides are two to four amino acids long, which is too short for the receptor binding that governs how most peptides work. The claim is that they pass into the nucleus and bind chromatin directly, switching on genes belonging to one tissue. Nothing else described on this site proposes anything like it.
Peptides this short are also unusual as drugs. Most are degraded within minutes, and the argument for these is that being small enough to cross membranes intact is precisely what lets them reach the nucleus. Whether enough survives an injection to do anything at a cellular level is the question the literature never closes.
Behind it is a large body of work from a single institute across several decades. It is real research, and it is not evaluable to contemporary standards: registration, pre-specified protocols, blinding and independent replication are largely absent, and no group outside the programme has reproduced the central findings. Forty years is a long time for that to stay true.
There is a structural objection on top of the evidential one. Several of these peptides differ from each other by a single amino acid and are assigned to entirely unrelated organs. Cartalax is Ala-Glu-Asp and goes to cartilage. Ovagen is Glu-Asp-Leu and goes to the liver. Chonluten is Glu-Asp-Gly and goes to the lung. A mechanism precise enough to tell cartilage from liver from lung on the strength of one terminal residue is an extraordinary claim, and nobody outside the group that made it has tested it.
Because the mechanism is described as genomic rather than receptor-mediated, none of the pharmacokinetic reasoning used elsewhere on this site carries over. There is no receptor occupancy to model, and no dose-response curve established outside the originating work. The ten-day course that appears on every one of these compounds is a convention, and it is the same ten days whether the target is the prostate or the pineal gland.