Origins
When was GHK-Cu discovered?
GHK is one of the few compounds in this range that was found in a body rather than drawn on a board. Loren Pickart traced it out of human plasma in the early 1970s.
The short answer
| Date | 1973 |
| Who | Loren Pickart |
| Where | San Francisco, California |
| Origin | Found, not designed — it occurs naturally and was isolated from tissue. |
Where it came from
Pickart was working on liver cells in culture and noticed that plasma from younger donors did not behave the same way as plasma from older ones. Rather than leave that as an observation, he set about separating the plasma until he had the fraction responsible, and the fraction turned out to be very small: three amino acids, glycine, histidine and lysine, in that order.
The other half of the finding was the copper. GHK binds copper(II) tightly and specifically, and in plasma it is largely found carrying one. That is why GHK-Cu is written as a complex rather than as a plain tripeptide, why its powder and solutions are blue, and why a molecular weight quoted for GHK-Cu counts the metal as well as the peptide — a point that trips people up when they check a certificate.
The 1973 date is the usual one cited for the description of the tripeptide. Pickart continued publishing on it for decades afterwards, and a good deal of the later literature is his, which is worth knowing when reading it.
Why it is called that
G, H and K are the one-letter codes for glycine, histidine and lysine. Cu is copper. The name is the sequence and its metal, nothing more.
Where it stands now
GHK-Cu is used widely in cosmetic formulation, where it appears under INCI names such as copper tripeptide-1. That is a different regulatory category from the material supplied for laboratory work.
What this page does not say
Nothing above is a statement about what GHK-Cu does in a body, and none of it is guidance on use. A compound’s history is a record of laboratories and dates; it is not evidence for anything, and the fact that a programme was looking for something is not a finding that it was found.
More on GHK-Cu
- GHK-Cu — prices and sizes
- Buying GHK-Cu in New Zealand
- What is GHK-Cu?
- The GHK-Cu certificate of analysis
What is GHK-Cu? · The full timeline · GHK-Cu — sizes and prices
