Thymalin

Status

No approved product. No FDA-approved labeling exists. Thymalin is registered as a medicine in Russia and is not approved in the United States, the European Union or elsewhere.

What it is

A thymus peptide preparation studied for immune signaling in older adults.

What published research measured

A polypeptide complex extracted from calf thymus, and the compound on which most of the clinical claims made for the whole bioregulator category actually rest — including long-running Russian observational work reporting reduced mortality in elderly cohorts. Two qualifications matter more than anything else here. First, it is an undefined mixture extracted from animal tissue rather than a single characterized molecule, so batch composition is not standardized in the way a synthetic peptide's is. Second, the studies come almost entirely from one research network, are largely published in Russian, and have not been independently replicated outside it; none is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. It is a registered medicine in Russia. Anyone reading the mortality data should note it was generated on this extract and not on the synthetic short peptides usually sold under the same programme's name.

Source

Khavinson and colleagues, St Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology — Russian-language observational literature · Absence of ClinicalTrials.gov registration for the Khavinson bioregulator programme

Sources

• Primary source
• CDC handling principles
• Primary source