Survey 08 · The masthead
About Medicinal GHK-Cu
Who maintains this field guide, what it is, and the line it does not cross.
What this project is
Medicinal GHK-Cu is a field guide to the peer-reviewed research on GHK-Cu, the copper-binding tripeptide glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine. It runs no clinic and staffs no clinicians; it gives no medical advice, prescribes nothing, and diagnoses nothing, and it neither manufactures nor sells nor distributes any product. What it does is survey the published science and cite where every observation came from.
The approach is the one a field naturalist takes to a territory: survey what is there, label it accurately, mark the boundaries, and cite where every observation came from. The GHK-Cu literature is unusually well-suited to that treatment. The compound was first isolated from human plasma in 1973, it is endogenous rather than synthetic, and its published record now spans five decades across skin, hair, wound-repair, the gut and the brain [6]. That breadth is exactly why a careful index is worth maintaining.
What the name means — and does not
The word 'medicinal' in this site's name is editorial framing, not a service claim. It describes the lens — a heritage-apothecary, research-survey posture toward a copper peptide with a long therapeutic-research history — not an offer of treatment, consultation, or prescription. This site does not diagnose, prescribe, dispense, or advise. There are no doctors, pharmacists, or clinical staff behind it, real or implied.
We hold one editorial standard above all others: every quantitative claim is tied to a published source, and the gaps are marked as plainly as the findings. GHK-Cu has a strong preclinical and topical-cosmetic record and a thin controlled-human one, and this guide states both halves without smoothing the difference. Where a result belongs to a combination formulation rather than pure GHK-Cu, or to a rodent model rather than a human trial, we say so.
How the literature is weighed
Findings are surveyed by evidence class, not by enthusiasm. A picomolar collagen dose-response measured in human fibroblasts [1] carries different weight than a community-circulated dosing protocol with no peer-reviewed basis. A placebo-controlled hair-count trial [4] is reported with its formulation caveat intact. A genome-wide expression figure is reported alongside the honest note that the often-quoted '~4,000 genes' number is an extrapolation [2].
We also flag a structural feature of this field: a large share of the foundational GHK-Cu mechanistic and review literature originates from a single investigator and colleagues, which is why independent replication of the broader gene-expression and anti-aging claims matters and is noted where relevant [6]. None of this is a verdict for or against the compound. It is a map of what the studies have measured and where the trail currently ends.