Bioregulators
A family of very short peptides — often two to four amino acids — developed in St Petersburg and claimed to act as tissue-specific regulators of gene expression. They have a large literature and a small evidence base, and those two facts are frequently confused for one another.
The definitions and the per-compound data below are solid. The historical narrative is still being checked against primary sources and is marked draft until it has been. Where this page does not yet know something, it says so rather than filling the gap.
Three words that get used interchangeably, and shouldn't
Almost every English-language page on this topic blurs three different kinds of product into the single word "bioregulator." They are not the same thing, and the difference decides whether a sequence can even be written down.
This distinction is the reason this site has a required substance_type field.
A defined peptide such as Vilon has one sequence. A complex such as Thymalin does not —
it is a mixture, and any page that prints a single sequence for it has invented one.
Why the evidence is hard to weigh
There is a substantial published record here, and it is genuinely difficult to assess for three structural reasons rather than any one damning flaw:
- Much of it is in Russian, in a small number of journals, and a large share of the human work originates from a single institute.
- A significant portion is authored or co-authored by the compounds' own developers. That is not misconduct, but it is the definition of a finding that has not yet been independently replicated.
- Trials are frequently small, unblinded, and report composite or surrogate endpoints, which makes the strong longevity claims in circulation much further from the data than they appear.
None of that makes the compounds inert. It means the honest description of most claims here is "plausible, under-tested, and not independently confirmed" — which is exactly what the evidence tier on each entry is for.
Which peptide goes with which preparation
Each cytogen was designed as the defined-sequence stand-in for an organ extract. The pairings below are drawn from the entries themselves, so a pair only appears once both halves exist in the codex and a source has been recorded for the link.
Attention versus evidence
The table below sets how much the internet talks about each compound against how much is actually known about it. The two do not track each other, and where they diverge hardest is usually where the marketing is loudest.