Cardiogen

The data on Cardiogen were gathered over years at the Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology in St. Petersburg, from animal experiments and a small number of studies in humans. Outside that environment the peptide has barely been examined; Western European or American laboratories have so far hardly retraced the findings. Keep that frame in mind for everything that follows.

Cardiogen itself is a synthetic tetrapeptide with the sequence Ala-Glu-Asp-Arg. Within the Khavinson peptides it is assigned to the cardiovascular system and was developed to study how gene expression in heart tissue shifts with age.

Findings reported from preclinical work:

• an influence on protein synthesis in heart muscle cells
• normalisation of markers that change with age in cardiac tissue
• gene activity in the myocardium as the actual point of attack

The underlying mechanism is explained epigenetically, as for the whole class: the short peptide is thought to bind regulatory regions of DNA and thereby alter the activity of certain genes in the heart muscle, not the gene sequence. In the study protocols described, Cardiogen was given subcutaneously or intramuscularly in courses of 10 to 20 days, repeated two or three times a year. The peptide is supplied as a lyophilisate, for research and education only.

Toxic effects of any significance are not described in the existing preclinical work or in the few human studies; in this literature Cardiogen counts as one of the mildest peptides of the Khavinson series. For a compound aimed at the cardiovascular system, though, the thin evidence weighs heavily: small, mostly Russian-language studies from a single institute, no independent peer-reviewed replication and nothing resembling long-term data on how safe it is for the cardiovascular system.

Add to this that every observation comes from short courses of 10 to 20 days. What uninterrupted administration would do is an open question. The most frequent concrete observation is mild, transient redness or irritation at the injection site after subcutaneous or intramuscular injection; the tetrapeptide itself is credited with low reactivity. This summary is no substitute for medical advice.

• Senescence-Associated Secretory Phenotype of Cardiovascular System Cells and Inflammaging: Perspectives of Peptide Regulation - review in Cells (2022, Khavinson et al.) on how short peptides might act on ageing cells of the cardiovascular system and on inflammaging.
• Studies of the Effects of Vilon and Epithalon on Gene Expression in Mouse Heart using DNA-Microarray Technology - microarray investigation by Anisimov et al. (2002) of which genes in the mouse heart change their activity under Khavinson peptides.
• Peptide bioregulation of aging: results and prospects - Anisimov and Khavinson (Biogerontology 2010) place the peptide class within ageing research.