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Cerluten

Also known as Cerluten Cytomax, brain peptide complex capsule, cerebral cortex peptide bioregulator

Bovine brain extract capsule from the Khavinson Cytomax line, with no published study under that name.

preclinical Immune & longevity supplement

At a glance

Category
Immune & longevity
Status
supplement
Made from
animal-derived Sold as a peptide complex extracted from the brain, generally described as cerebral cortex, of young cattle. Khavinson's own account of this programme describes peptide preparations made from extracts of different tissues including the cerebral cortex 3. PeptideX has not been able to verify the species, country of origin or age of the source animals for this capsule; some brain-derived preparations in this family are described in different sources as bovine and in others as porcine, and no such information reaches the buyer.
Route
oral capsule
Half-life
Not measured. There is no pharmacokinetic study of this product in humans or animals, and for an undefined mixture taken by mouth the question would not have a single answer in any case.
Molecular weight
No single value applies. This is a tissue extract rather than a defined molecule - a mixture of free amino acids and short peptides whose composition is neither disclosed nor standardised in any publicly available specification.

Cerluten is a capsule product in the 'Cytomax' range of the Khavinson peptide bioregulator programme - the natural organ-extract half of that programme, as opposed to the 'Cytogen' range of chemically synthesised short peptides such as Pinealon and Cortagen. It is sold internationally through online retailers as a food supplement. It is not an approved medicine anywhere in the EU or the US and no regulator has assessed a dossier for it. It is widely stated that the Cytomax capsules are registered in Russia as BAD (biologically active food supplements), a notification regime with no efficacy assessment attached. PeptideX could not open the Russian register from outside Russia to confirm that Cerluten specifically appears in it, so that registration is recorded here as an unverified claim - and even if confirmed it would describe a notification, not an approval.

Doping status: Not listed by name on the WADA Prohibited List

Checked against the WADA 2026 Prohibited List. For a specific product and country, Global DRO is the lookup athletes are expected to use — the List names substances, not brand names.

Of the four organ-extract capsules covered here this is the one where the sourcing question is sharpest, because brain is central nervous tissue. The WHO tables on tissue infectivity in transmissible spongiform encephalopathies place brain in Table IA, the high-infectivity category, for every form of TSE examined - human variant CJD, cattle BSE, sheep scrapie and chronic wasting disease 5. The same document is equally explicit that infectivity category is not the same as risk category, and that the oral route is a comparatively inefficient route of transmission 5. So the honest statement has two halves. No case of TSE transmission has been attributed to any of these capsules, and this is not a claim that they have caused harm. But a medicinal product manufactured from bovine or porcine central nervous tissue has to document the BSE risk status of the country of origin, the age of the animals, the tissue category and batch traceability 6, and a food supplement bought online documents none of it to the person swallowing it. The question is open, not settled. Separately, and independently of any of that: a reader who is vegetarian or vegan, or who keeps halal or kosher, is being asked to swallow animal brain tissue.

This is a short entry. There is little or no published research on this compound, so there is correspondingly little to report. Empty dosing or reconstitution sections mean no credible figures exist — not that they were left out.

Mechanism of action

Cerluten belongs to the doctrine of 'peptide bioregulators' from Khavinson's group at the St Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology, which holds that short peptides extracted from an organ selectively restore the function of that same organ by entering cell nuclei and directing gene expression 3. Applied here, a brain extract is said to restore brain function. That premise of tissue specificity is the central and least substantiated assumption of the entire programme: there is no accepted mechanism by which fragments of two to five residues, chemically indistinguishable from ordinary proteolytic breakdown material present everywhere in the body, would navigate selectively to the cortex and bind sequence-specifically to promoter DNA.

The oral route compounds the problem rather than solving it. A neuroactive claim for a swallowed peptide mixture requires the material to survive gastric acid and intestinal peptidases, to be absorbed, and then to cross the blood-brain barrier - three separate hurdles, none of which has been demonstrated for this product in any published study. The synthetic counterparts in the same programme, Pinealon and Cortagen, are covered separately on this site; whatever can be said for or against them was established with defined molecules given by injection and does not transfer to a capsule of undefined extract.

What the research shows

There is no evidence for Cerluten. A PubMed search for the name returns no records, and ClinicalTrials.gov returns no registered study, as of July 2026 12. What appears on retail pages is imported from work on other substances - the injectable Russian brain-extract medicine Cortexin 4, or the synthetic peptides Pinealon and Cortagen. Those are different products with different compositions and different routes of administration, and treating their literature as this capsule's evidence is the specific mistake to avoid.

Research in humans

No published human study of Cerluten. No trial, no case series, no pharmacokinetic or tolerability data. The literature on this product by name is empty 12.

Animal and lab research

No published animal study of Cerluten by name. Animal work on brain preparations from this research tradition concerns other, injected preparations, and is not evidence about this capsule 3.

Caveats. There is nothing to appraise, which is itself the finding. Two structural problems would remain even if studies appeared. The product is an undefined tissue extract with no standardised or disclosed composition, so batches are not guaranteed to be the same substance. And the whole published body of work in this programme used injection, while this is swallowed - a difference that determines whether anything reaches the circulation at all, let alone the brain.

What it is used for

  • Sold and self-administered in capsule courses as a general cognitive and 'brain support' supplement, without a validated indication and without a single published study of the product 12
  • Presented by sellers as the natural counterpart of the synthetic peptides Pinealon and Cortagen; the evidence offered for that framing was generated with those synthetic peptides or with other injected brain preparations, not with this capsule 3

Dosing

  • No dose is given here, because none has been studied. There is no published human study of this product, no dose-finding work, no maximum tolerated dose, no pharmacokinetics and no dose-response curve 12.
  • Capsule course schedules circulate on retail pages. They are packaging conventions rather than findings; the protocol section below records the common one explicitly as a vendor convention with no published basis, not as a validated dose.
  • A dose taken from Pinealon, Cortagen or Cortexin is not a dose for this capsule. Two of those are defined synthetic molecules and the third is an injected extract; a milligram figure on a capsule of undefined extract is a mass of powder, not a quantity of active substance.

These figures describe what the literature and published protocols report. They are not advice and not a dosing instruction.

Protocols

Vendor capsule course (packaging convention, no published basis)

user protocol — not validated

Source: Retailer instructions and Khavinson-programme course conventions

This is not a validated schedule. It is a pattern that circulates among users and sellers, reproduced because it is what people actually follow — not because it has been tested. No trial established these doses, this interval or this duration, and nobody is checking what is in the vial. Treat every number below as an assertion, not a finding.

A courseone to two capsules a day for 10 to 30 days, the length set by the pack size
Repeattypically two or three courses a year, with sellers suggesting more frequent repeats from around age 40

This is a packaging convention, not a dose. The 10- to 30-day length is set by the number of capsules in the pack, and the 'two or three courses a year' cadence comes from the sellers' own promotional guidance rather than from any study of this product 12. Because the capsule contains an undefined tissue extract, a figure given in capsules or milligrams describes a mass of powder rather than a quantity of any identified active substance, and no published human study establishes that any of it is absorbed or does anything.

Schedules are reproduced as their source states them. Units, IU and milligrams explains why the figures are not interchangeable between products.

Reconstitution

Supplied as capsules taken by mouth. Nothing is reconstituted and no injection is involved.

Safety

Side effects

  • Unknown. No systematic safety monitoring of this product has been published 12; the absence of reported adverse effects reflects the absence of any study, not evidence of safety
  • Allergic reaction to foreign animal protein is the predictable class risk for any animal tissue extract, though the oral route makes systemic sensitisation less likely than injection would
  • No toxicology, carcinogenicity or reproductive toxicity programme for this product exists in the internationally accessible literature
  • The identity and purity of the contents of a capsule bought online cannot be verified by the buyer, and no independent analysis has been published

Do not use if

  • Pregnancy and breastfeeding - no data of any kind
  • Children and adolescents - no data; effects of a brain tissue extract during neurodevelopment have never been examined
  • Known hypersensitivity to bovine or porcine protein
  • Anyone avoiding animal-derived material on dietary or religious grounds - this is animal brain tissue 5
  • Active, past or suspected malignancy - the claimed mechanisms are transcriptional and proliferative and have never been examined for oncological consequences in this product

Interactions

Not studied. No interaction study of any kind exists for this product 12. With an extract whose active constituents are unidentified, such a study would also be difficult to design.

Sources