Pancragen: what the studies show, status and safety

Summary

Pancragen is a synthetic chain of four amino acids from a St Petersburg institute, assigned to the pancreas and sold for blood sugar. No trial of it has ever been registered anywhere. People received it on three recorded occasions, none registered, none blinded and none independently reviewed, and on the best documented of them only half of twelve participants showed the reported change. It is approved as a medicine nowhere and banned in sport at all times.

Key findings at a glance

• No trial in people has ever been registered. A registry query on 20 September 2026 returned zero for Pancragen, Pankragen and KEDW, as an intervention and as free text. A control query for semaglutide returned 755 studies ^[1].
• The whole literature is about a dozen papers. PubMed returns nine records under the name, Europe PMC six that concern the substance. Almost every one comes from the originating group or its co-authors, and no laboratory outside that circle has repeated a single finding ^[2].
• People received it on three recorded occasions, none of them registered. There is a 2011 report on older people with type 2 diabetes and a 2013 report on twelve older people with impaired glucose tolerance. The third is an example inside the inventors' patent, covering 36 patients ^[3], ^[4], ^[5].
• In the best documented of those, the reported change appeared in half. Twelve people took 500 micrograms twice a day for four weeks. The authors report a significant fall in glucose during a 75 gram glucose test in 50 per cent of them, with no control group and no effect sizes ^[4].
• The 2011 report gives no numbers for the peptide. It states that fasting glucose, glucose tolerance, insulin and an insulin resistance index improved, without a dose, a route, a duration, a group size or a single figure. Its only stated figure concerns melatonin, which was 70 per cent lower in the diabetic group ^[3].
• In old monkeys, a licensed tablet outperformed it. Five animals received 50 micrograms a day into the muscle for ten days and four received glimepiride by mouth. Both lowered fasting glucose; the licensed drug had the stronger and longer effect ^[6].
• It exists in none of the reference chemical databases. No PubChem record, no CAS number, no regulator substance code, no entry in the open knowledge base. Control queries for a sister peptide work in every one of them ^[7], ^[8], ^[9].
• The studied molecule and the traded powder are declared differently. Every paper and the patent describe the amide form, Lys-Glu-Asp-Trp-NH2. Western sellers declare the free acid. No published work has tested the free acid ^[5], ^[10], ^[11].
• In Russia it is a food, not a medicine. Capsules and tablets carry 100 micrograms of a peptide complex, and the entry says in its own words that it is not a medicinal product ^[12].
• Circulating injection schedules run 200 to 500 times higher. Sales pages give 2 to 5 milligrams a day for 20 to 30 days, against the 10 micrograms a day for ten days of the patent example ^[5], ^[13].
• Banned in sport around the clock under the class that catches every substance no health authority has approved ^[14].

What it is

Pancragen is a laboratory-made tetrapeptide: lysine, glutamic acid, aspartic acid and tryptophan, joined in that order and usually written KEDW. Four amino acids and a mass of 575.62 make it a very small molecule, chemically close to an ordinary fragment of digested protein. The American medical library indexes it under the sequence rather than the trade name ^[5], ^[10].

It comes from the St Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology, the group around Vladimir Khavinson, who patented it from December 2003 with three colleagues. The international application lapsed, and the family now carries the status "ceased". Every later paper on the substance has Khavinson or one of his co-authors on it ^[5], ^[15], ^[2].

The words "bioregulator" and "cytogen" belong to that institute and its distributors. A cytogen, in that house vocabulary, is a synthetic short peptide as opposed to a mixture extracted from animal tissue. Neither word appears in any pharmacopoeia, in any medicines classification or in any regulator's definition ^[16], ^[17].

Two identity problems deserve stating at the outset. The published work describes the amide form, capped at one end, while Western sellers declare their powder as the uncapped free acid. The Russian capsule declares only a "peptide complex" listed as its four amino acids ^[5], ^[11], ^[12].

Quick facts

How it works

Nobody knows. No receptor has been identified for it, no binding has ever been measured, and every mechanism on offer is either a computer calculation or a description of what changed in a dish.

The account given by the originating group runs as follows. The peptide would enter the cell through a carrier protein and reach the nucleus. There it would settle on a particular stretch of DNA, or on the tails of the proteins that package it, and change which genes are read. Each step rests on different and mostly indirect evidence.

• Getting into the cell. A 2023 calculation scored the capped peptide at two carrier models, at −21.78 and −20.57. A companion paper lists it among the stronger candidate blockers of one amino acid carrier. Both are docking scores, and no transport of this molecule has ever been measured ^[18], ^[16].
• Settling on DNA. One paper from the group puts it on a stretch written "acct". Another paper from the same group puts the same molecule on "GGCAG" in the wide groove of the double helix. The two answers contradict each other, and both come from calculations ^[19], ^[20].
• Sitting on packing proteins. Fluorescence measurements show it binding all four types of histone tested. The histones came from wheat, a plant model rather than human chromatin, and it was one of six peptides examined ^[21].
• Switching on pancreatic genes. In ageing human pancreatic cell cultures it raised the readout of several genes that steer how pancreatic cells mature, among them PDX1, PAX4, PAX6, FOXA2 and NKX2.2 ^[22], ^[23].
• Changing DNA labelling. A follow-up measured the chemical tags on those gene promoters. For three genes the tags moved with the readout; for PAX4 they did not move at all, and for FOXA2 they moved without any link to the readout. The authors conclude that "some other mechanisms" must be at work ^[24].

The patent adds a broader claim, that the substance raises insulin secretion and the sensitivity of tissue to insulin. A later paper from the group calls it a mimetic of insulinotropic peptides, meaning a stand-in for the gut signals that prompt insulin release. That phrase describes a hypothesis, not a measured receptor effect ^[5], ^[20].

There is a size problem underneath all of this. A chain of four amino acids carries very little information, far too little to pick out one gene in a whole genome. Its four building blocks also circulate freely in the blood as ordinary amino acids, and short chains are cut quickly by enzymes in blood and gut ^[16].

One boundary is worth drawing against the neighbouring products. The same institute also sells extracted tissue mixtures under a separate label, which are not single molecules at all. Pancragen is a defined synthetic chain, and the two categories should not be read as evidence for each other ^[17].

What the studies found

The record is a handful of small papers from one research school, two of them in monkeys and two of them in people, plus a patent that carries the most detailed numbers of all. Nothing in it was registered, blinded or repeated elsewhere ^[1], ^[2].

The two Kyiv reports, the only published human record

Unregistered observation The 2011 report covers 30 healthy older people and 33 older patients with type 2 diabetes. Its one concrete figure is not about the peptide at all: night-time melatonin production was 70 per cent lower in the diabetic group than in healthy people of the same age ^[3].

Unregistered observation The authors then state that in the diabetic patients fasting glucose, glucose during a standard tolerance test, plasma insulin and an insulin resistance index all fell, while participants who received nothing showed no change. The abstract gives no dose, no route, no duration, no figures and no account of how the groups were formed ^[3].

Unregistered observation The 2013 report screened 150 people, 39 young, 42 middle-aged and 69 older. Twelve of the older group with impaired glucose tolerance took 500 micrograms twice a day for four weeks. Glucose was measured at 0, 30, 60 and 120 minutes after 75 grams of glucose ^[4].

Unregistered observation The result is reported as a significant fall in plasma glucose during that test "in 50 percent" of the twelve, so in six people. There was no control group, no randomisation and no blinding, and no effect size, spread or p-value is given ^[4].

Neither report can show whether the substance works. Both have the inventor as a co-author, neither appears in any trial registry, and neither states an ethics approval number. They are observations of what happened, published without the numbers that would let anyone check them ^[1], ^[3], ^[4].

The patent example, which is not a trial

Patent example, not a study The patent describes 36 patients, seven men and 29 women, aged 16 to 83, of whom 23 had type 1 and 13 had type 2 diabetes; 32 were on insulin. Sixteen received 10 micrograms into the muscle daily for ten days, against 16 controls ^[5].

Patent example, not a study The document reports that eight of the treated group used less insulin, six kept the same amount and two needed more, while 14 of 16 controls needed more. Four further patients took 100 micrograms twice a day by mouth for ten days ^[5].

These figures cannot be read as clinical evidence, and the reasons are structural. A patent application is examined for novelty, not for medical results. There is no randomisation, no blinding, no registration, no ethics record, no sample size calculation and no statistical test of any kind ^[1], ^[5].

They should not be read as an achievable outcome either. The document records no blood sugar monitoring, no safety endpoint and no rule by which those insulin changes were made. Insulin and other glucose-lowering treatments are prescribed and adjusted by a doctor, and nothing on this page is a reason to change any of them.

Animals, where most of the work sits

Animal data In old female rhesus monkeys, 50 micrograms per animal a day into the muscle for ten days raised the rate at which glucose cleared from the blood and moved insulin and C-peptide patterns towards those of young animals. Part of the effect was still reported three weeks later ^[25].

Animal data The 2015 monkey comparison is the most informative of the set, and not in the substance's favour. Five animals received it into the muscle and four received the licensed tablet glimepiride by mouth, each for ten days. Both lowered fasting glucose; glimepiride had the stronger and more sustained effect ^[6].

Animal data In rats with chemically induced diabetes, the substance given by mouth lowered blood sugar during treatment. Given into the muscle it normalised how cells stuck to the lining of small blood vessels, but left the leakiness of those vessels unchanged. Neither abstract states a dose or a group size ^[26].

Cells in a dish

Cell culture In ageing human pancreatic cell cultures the substance raised the readout of genes that steer how pancreatic cells mature. From that result the authors conclude it could be an effective tool in treating diabetes and pancreatitis, which is a long way past what a dish can show ^[22].

Cell culture A Russian-language paper from the same group reports higher levels of the enzymes MMP2 and MMP9, of PCNA and Ki67, both markers of cell division, and lower p53. The rise in those two enzymes is read as favourable here, while the same group treats blocking MMP-9 as favourable for other peptides ^[27].

Animal tissue The earliest paper, from 2006, added 0.05 nanograms per millilitre to organ cultures of pancreas, heart, lung and prostate from rats aged three weeks and 18 months. Each of four peptides was reported to act on its own assigned tissue. The abstract carries no figures ^[28].

The negative and missing results

• The vessel leakiness endpoint did not move. In the rat study, the measure that would matter most for diabetic complications was explicitly unchanged ^[26].
• The gene labelling story does not hold together. PAX4 readout changed without any change in labelling, and FOXA2 labelling changed without any link to readout ^[24].
• The licensed comparator won. In the only experiment where the substance was set against an approved medicine, the approved medicine had the stronger effect ^[6].
• Two papers give two different DNA targets for the same molecule, both from calculations by the same group ^[19], ^[20].
• One abstract reports no result at all. A 2010 paper on the substance's biological activity describes the method and stops there ^[29].
• A second rat paper is a single sentence. It states that an effect on pancreatic tissue was found, without a dose, a group size or a figure ^[30].

What is still unknown

• Everything about how the body handles it. No half-life, no absorption, no distribution, no breakdown and no excretion data exist, for any route or any species ^[18].
• Whether the oral route works at all. The Russian product is swallowed, the patent and monkey work inject, and nobody has measured whether anything is absorbed ^[12], ^[5].
• Whether any of it can be reproduced. No laboratory outside the originating circle has repeated a single finding; the one recent mention elsewhere simply cites the group's work ^[2], ^[31].
• What happens beyond four weeks. The longest recorded human exposure is 28 days ^[4].
• What is in the material sold. With no pharmacopoeia monograph and no official reference substance, a traded vial can be measured against nothing ^[11].

Side effects and safety

There is no safety record. That is not the same as being well tolerated: it means nothing has ever been systematically collected that could be reported ^[1], ^[2].

• No adverse event reports exist. The American pharmacovigilance database returned no record for the name on 20 September 2026, and no case report was found in the literature ^[8], ^[2].
• The one reassurance on offer comes from the inventors. A monkey paper concludes that the substance is effective and safe. It rests on five treated animals over ten days, with no dummy-treated group and no safety measurements reported ^[6].
• No toxicology has been published. There is no acute or chronic toxicity study, no dose escalation and no established no-effect level, for any species ^[2].
• The obvious risk has never been looked at. The substance is described as lowering blood sugar. Whether it can push blood sugar too low has not been examined in any of the published work, and no monitoring scheme appears anywhere ^[5], ^[20].
• Nothing is known about interactions. That gap matters because the patent example and the Russian sales material both describe people using it alongside glucose-lowering medicines ^[5], ^[32].
• The injected form is the least controlled of all. Vials of 10 to 50 milligrams are sold outside any pharmaceutical quality system, with sterility, endotoxin content and actual peptide content unknown ^[11].

Data gaps run right through the file. Nothing is known about immune reactions to the substance itself, about cancer risk, about effects on reproduction, or about pregnancy, breastfeeding, children and reduced liver or kidney function ^[2].

One mismatch is a hazard in its own right. A vial holds 10 to 50 milligrams, while the only injected amount ever given to a person was 10 micrograms a day. A vial therefore holds one to five thousand times that amount, which makes a measuring error the expected outcome rather than a rare one ^[5], ^[11].

Diabetes and impaired glucose tolerance are conditions that need proper medical care. Nothing on this page describes a treatment, and questions about managing blood sugar belong with a doctor.

Doses used in studies

The doses below are simply what the cited studies gave, listed so that the results can be understood. They are not advice on how to use anything.

Four lines in this table involve people, and they come from three sources: two rows from a single example inside a patent application, and one row each from the two unregistered Kyiv observations. None of them comes from a registered or reviewed trial. They are listed because they exist, not because they show anything.

A concentration in a dish cannot be converted into an amount for a body, and neither can an amount given to a rat or a monkey. Between the smallest and the largest figure in this table lies a factor of many thousands, and no dose-finding study explains any of it ^[2].

The last patent line needs particular care. The figure quoted is the wording of the patent description, and it was never tested as a dose. The patent's own claims print the same range in units a thousand times larger. That alone is reason enough not to treat the document as a source on amounts ^[5].

The schedules circulating on sales pages sit outside all of this. One Russian trade page gives 2 to 5 milligrams a day for 20 to 30 days as an injection ^[13].

That is 200 to 500 times the only injected amount ever given to a person, and 40 to 100 times the monkey amount. It is derived from no study, because no study of that kind exists ^[5], ^[13].

Development and approval status

There is no development programme. Nothing was ever filed with a medicines regulator, no phase of clinical testing began, and the patent family that started it all has lapsed ^[1], ^[15].

• 2003 the St Petersburg group files the patent family claiming a blood-glucose-regulating tetrapeptide ^[5].
• 2005 the international application is published, covering 15 countries and regions; it later lapses ^[15].
• 2006 and 2007 the first tissue culture and rat papers appear, all from the same circle ^[28], ^[26], ^[30].
• 2009 the United States patent is granted, six years after filing ^[5].
• 2011 the first report of people receiving the substance is published in Kyiv, without figures ^[3].
• 2013 the second and last human report describes twelve people over four weeks ^[4].
• 2014 and 2015 two small monkey studies appear, the second comparing it against a licensed tablet ^[25], ^[6].

Three rows need care. The Australian entry means the substance was never scheduled, not that it may be supplied; unapproved research peptides are treated there as prescription-only material in practice. The European, British and Swiss entries rest on absence everywhere else, because those registers could not be read ^[35], ^[34].

The Russian row is the one most often misread. A food supplement is cleared as a food and passes no test of whether it works. The entry names a manufacturer, gives capsule and tablet sizes, and states plainly that the product is not a medicinal product ^[12].

One further sales claim belongs here for completeness. A Russian trade page describes an examination of 42 patients in 2007, with blood sugar said to normalise in all of them within five to ten days, and makes further claims about those patients' diabetes medicines. No publication and no registry entry exists for any of it ^[32].

All registers were checked on 20 September 2026. The wider legal picture is under are peptides legal and FDA-approved peptides.

Anti-doping

Pancragen is prohibited at all times, in and out of competition. It is not named on the 2026 list. Class S0 covers "any pharmacological substance which is not addressed by any of the subsequent sections of the List and with no current approval by any governmental regulatory health authority for human therapeutic use" ^[14].

That classification is a judgement call about where the substance belongs, but not a difficult one, because there is no approval anywhere to argue about. Substances in S0 are specified substances, which affects how a sanction is measured rather than whether the ban applies ^[14].

One boundary is worth naming. The 2026 list also prohibits "Insulins and insulin-mimetics" in a separate class. Pancragen is described as a mimetic of the gut signals that prompt insulin release, not of insulin itself, so that class does not catch it. No anti-doping body is known to have ruled on the point ^[14], ^[20].

German anti-doping law reads differently. Its annex lists banned substances one by one and names no pancreatic tetrapeptide, so possession is not an offence there. That is a gap in a closed list, not a permission ^[37].

No validated test for detecting it in a sample has been published, and detecting a four-part chain of ordinary amino acids would be demanding ^[2]. The full picture is at peptides banned in sport.

Compared with related peptides

The comparison is not about strength, because no head-to-head measure of effect exists against any of them. Two rows do the real work: semaglutide shows what a developed medicine for blood sugar looks like in a registry, and epitalon shows that even inside the same institute this molecule has drawn a fraction of the attention ^[1], ^[2].

The Vesugen and Bronchogen rows explain a recurring argument. The group's tissue-specificity claim rests on three peptides acting on three different tissues in one experiment, which is a single unreplicated result rather than a principle ^[23].

Common misconceptions

• "There are human studies, so it has been tested in people." Three occasions are recorded, none registered, none blinded, none with a stated ethics approval and none reporting effect sizes. Two are observations and one sits inside a patent application ^[1], ^[3], ^[4], ^[5].
• "The patent's 36 patients are clinical evidence." A patent is examined for novelty and inventiveness, not for medical results. That example appears in no registry and no journal, and the family has since lapsed ^[5], ^[15].
• "It is registered in Russia." It is registered there as a food, in capsules and tablets, and the entry states that it is not a medicinal product. A food registration involves no test of whether a product works ^[12].
• "The capsule and the injection are the same thing." The Russian supplement carries 100 micrograms of a peptide complex plus fillers. The Western vial holds 10 to 50 milligrams of powder for injection. No data connects the two ^[12], ^[11].
• "The powder sold in the West is the studied molecule." Every paper and the patent describe the amide form. Sellers declare the free acid, which differs in charge and in how fast enzymes cut it, and has never been tested ^[5], ^[10], ^[11].
• "It is a mimetic of insulin." The phrase in the literature is mimetic of insulinotropic peptides, meaning the gut signals that prompt insulin release. It is a hypothesis from a calculation paper, and no receptor has been identified ^[20].
• "The epigenetic mechanism is established." Two papers from the same group name two different DNA targets, and the group's own labelling study found two genes that behave the other way ^[19], ^[20], ^[24].
• "Bioregulator and cytogen are official categories." They are house words of one institute and its distributors, absent from every pharmacopoeia, classification and regulator definition ^[16], ^[17].
• "It is not on the doping list, so it is allowed." It is not named, but class S0 catches every substance no health authority has approved, which is exactly its situation ^[14].
• "Searching KEDW shows plenty of research." Two of the six PubMed hits for that string are false: an author's email address and a set of author initials in unrelated cardiology papers ^[38].
• "The islet organoid paper is about this peptide." That 2023 paper tests a different peptide taken from collagen, and cites this one only in passing ^[39].

Frequently asked questions

What is Pancragen?

It is a synthetic chain of four amino acids, lysine, glutamic acid, aspartic acid and tryptophan, written Lys-Glu-Asp-Trp or KEDW. The published work and the patent describe it with an amide cap at one end, formula C26H37N7O8 and mass 575.62. It comes from a St Petersburg institute that calls such molecules bioregulators and cytogens, house words with no standing in any official classification.

Has Pancragen ever been tested in people?

Not in a registered trial. A registry check on 20 September 2026 returned nothing under any spelling of the name. People received it on three recorded occasions: two reports from a Kyiv research group and one example inside the inventors' patent. None was registered, blinded or independently reviewed, and none reports effect sizes.

What did the human reports of Pancragen actually show?

Very little that can be checked. The 2011 report gives no dose, no route, no duration and not a single figure for the peptide's effect. The 2013 report describes twelve older people with impaired glucose tolerance taking it for four weeks, with the reported change appearing in half of them. Neither is a controlled trial, and neither can show whether the substance works.

Is Pancragen approved as a medicine anywhere?

No, in no country. Register checks on 20 September 2026 found no approval in the United States, the European Union, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Switzerland or Russia. In Russia it is sold as a capsule and tablet food supplement, and the entry states in its own words that it is not a medicine.

Does the Pancragen patent mean it has been approved or proven?

No. A granted patent is a property right over an invention, examined for novelty and inventiveness rather than for effect, safety or the right to sell. No medicines regulator took part in granting it, and the international family lapsed years ago.

Is the Pancragen sold in the West the same molecule that was studied?

Not as declared. The published work and the patent describe the amide form, Lys-Glu-Asp-Trp-NH2. Western sellers declare their powder as the free acid, H-Lys-Glu-Asp-Trp-OH. That cap changes charge and how quickly enzymes cut the chain, and no published work has tested the free acid.

How much Pancragen has ever been given to a person?

Three amounts have been described: 10 micrograms into the muscle for ten days and 100 micrograms twice a day by mouth for ten days, both in a patent example, and 500 micrograms twice a day by mouth for four weeks in the 2013 report. None of the three comes from a registered or reviewed trial. Injection schedules circulating on sales pages run to 2 to 5 milligrams a day, hundreds of times the injected figure, and come from no study.

Is Pancragen banned in sport?

Yes, at all times, in and out of competition. The name is not printed on the 2026 prohibited list. Class S0 covers any pharmacological substance that no government health authority has approved for human use, which describes this one exactly.

What are the side effects of Pancragen?

Nobody knows, because no study has ever collected them. There is no published toxicology, no adverse event report in the American database and no case report in the literature. The obvious question for a substance said to lower blood sugar, whether it can push blood sugar too low, has never been examined.

Is the Russian Pancragen capsule the same as the injectable powder?

No. The Russian product is a food supplement containing 100 micrograms of a peptide complex plus fillers, swallowed as a capsule or tablet. The Western product is a 10 to 50 milligram vial of powder for injection. Several orders of magnitude separate them, and no absorption data exists for either route.

Cite this page

The searches and register checks behind this page were run on 20 September 2026. For a substance with almost no scientific record, the date on which those searches came back nearly empty is part of the finding. Three things could still move it: a registered trial, an independent replication of any single result, or a change in the anti-doping classification.

myPeptides Research & Editing. (2026). Pancragen: what the studies show, status and safety. Version 1.0, 20 September 2026. myPeptides Peptide Register. Retrieved from https://mypep.app/peptides/pancragen

How pages in this register are compiled and graded is described under methodology; the full register is at peptides.

Last verified: 20 September 2026. Next review: on any registered trial, on any independent replication of the monkey or human reports, or on any change to the anti-doping classification.