Prostamax
Also known as KEDP peptide, Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro, lysyl-glutamyl-aspartyl-proline
Khavinson synthetic tetrapeptide marketed for the prostate; chromatin claims from a single research group.
At a glance
- Category
- Immune & longevity
- Status
- research chemical
- Route
- added directly to cell culture in the published chromatin work; oral in the retail supplement form; subcutaneous or intramuscular for the grey-market injectable powder
- Half-life
- No published pharmacokinetics in any species. An unmodified tetrapeptide with free termini; survival in plasma is presumably a matter of minutes. All circulating figures are unsourced.
- Onset
- No validated onset time; there are no controlled human data on the time course of any effect
- Molecular weight
- Approximately 487.5 g/mol for the free tetrapeptide (Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro, calculated). No independently determined value from a published characterisation was found.
- Sequence
- Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro 2
Prostamax is a synthetic short peptide from the Khavinson bioregulator programme, marketed for prostate health as an oral supplement and, on the grey market, as a lyophilised powder for injection. Contrary to how it is sometimes described, the substance that appears in the scientific literature under this name is a defined synthetic tetrapeptide, not a prostate-tissue extract: a Georgian chromatin paper states plainly that the 'oligopeptide bioregulator Prostamax' is Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro 2. It is a different product from the registered injectable bovine prostate extracts (Prostatilen and similar) and from any natural prostate-extract capsule. It is not an approved medicine in the EU or US; the corresponding oral products are widely stated to be registered in Russia only as food supplements (BAD), a notification regime with no efficacy assessment that PeptideX could not confirm from outside Russia.
Doping status: Not listed by name; as a non-approved substance it falls under the S0 residual category and is therefore prohibited at all times
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.
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
Prostamax sits in the same programme as Livagen, Cortagen and Pinealon 8: a short synthetic peptide, presented as the active fragment of a tissue extract, is claimed to enter cell nuclei and direct tissue-specific gene expression 6 - here, to restore prostate function and counter age-related prostate change. Despite the prostate framing, the actual published work on the molecule is not about the prostate at all but about chromatin in blood lymphocytes.
The signature claim is chromatin decondensation. The originating and affiliated Georgian laboratories report that Prostamax applied to lymphocytes from elderly donors shifts the thermal denaturation profile of chromatin and de-heterochromatinises it, increasing sister chromatid exchange and the frequency of active nucleolar organiser regions and releasing pericentromeric heterochromatin 1234. The interpretation offered is that the peptide reactivates genes silenced with age.
The standard objection applies. A four-residue peptide, chemically indistinguishable from ordinary proteolytic breakdown material found throughout the body, has no folded structure with which to make the multiple simultaneous contacts that sequence-specific DNA recognition requires, and no route to selective prostate targeting has been described. The chromatin observations may be real as observations - a shift in a melting curve is a physical measurement - but the leap to gene-selective epigenetic regulation, and from there to a benefit for the prostate, is a hypothesis that no independent group has tested.
What the research shows
Prostamax has a small indexed footprint - about six PubMed records 7 - and it is almost entirely one research circle studying the peptide's effect on lymphocyte chromatin in vitro, published in Biophysics, the Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine and Georgian Medical News. There is no controlled human trial, no independent replication, and - despite the marketing - no published clinical study of any prostate outcome. There is no basis for stating that Prostamax benefits the prostate in a human being.
Research in humans
No controlled clinical trial was found 7. The human-derived work is ex vivo: peptide applied to blood lymphocytes taken from elderly donors, with chromatin morphology, sister chromatid exchange and nucleolar organiser region proteins as the readouts 123. That is a cell-culture experiment using human cells, not a study of an effect in people, and none of it measures anything about the prostate.
Animal and lab research
Reported effects come from organotypic tissue-culture work in the same tradition, in which Prostamax appears among several peptides tested for tissue-specific effects on explants from young and old rats 5. There is no in vivo prostate model published under the name that PeptideX was able to verify; claims of efficacy in rat prostatitis that circulate on retail pages could not be traced to an indexed primary study of this peptide.
Caveats. Single research circle with a commercial interest in the product; small samples; morphological and chromatin endpoints scored without described blinding, which matters greatly for subjective microscopy; no protocol registration; frequent testing of Prostamax alongside other bioregulator peptides, which prevents attribution to KEDP specifically 35; and publication in journals with limited external scrutiny, some of the primary work in Russian. More than twenty years on, there is no independent replication and no prostate outcome study at all.
What it is used for
- Marketed and self-administered for prostate health and as an anti-ageing peptide - a framing the published evidence, which is about lymphocyte chromatin rather than the prostate, does not support 17
- Studied ex vivo for chromatin decondensation in lymphocytes from elderly donors 1234
- Used as one of several test peptides in organotypic tissue culture 5
Dosing
- There is no validated human dose: no dose-finding study, no maximum tolerated dose, no human pharmacokinetics and no dose-response curve 7.
- The published work used microgram-to-nanogram quantities added to cell culture 14; that is a concentration in a dish, not a dose, and cannot be converted into one.
- The milligram figures in circulating user protocols track the vial and capsule size the product is sold in, not any research finding. Left null rather than manufacturing a protocol.
These figures describe what the literature and published protocols report. They are not advice and not a dosing instruction.
Protocols
Bioregulator course (grey market)
user protocol — not validatedSource: vendor material and user protocols; no published basis
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.
| Oral course | 1 to 3 capsules daily for about 10 to 30 days |
|---|---|
| Injectable course (research-chemical powder) | a few milligrams per day by subcutaneous or intramuscular injection for 10 to 20 days |
| Repeat | once or twice a year in some vendor instructions |
No publication supports any milligram figure for Prostamax. The published work is in vitro at microgram-to-nanogram concentrations 14, which is not a dose; the circulating numbers follow the capsule count and vial size. The retail oral capsule and the injected research-chemical powder are different preparations sold under the same name.
Schedules are reproduced as their source states them. Units, IU and milligrams explains why the figures are not interchangeable between products.
Reconstitution
- Vial sizes
- 10 mg, 20 mg (lyophilised powder, research chemical); also oral capsules in the retail supplement line, a different preparation
- Solvent
- bacteriostatic water (0.9% benzyl alcohol); sterile water only if used within the same session
- Storage
- Supplier guidance: powder at 2-8 °C short term or -20 °C long term, protected from light; reconstituted at 2-8 °C for roughly 2-4 weeks. These are handling conventions, not pharmacopoeia specifications.
Let the diluent run down the vial wall, swirl and do not shake; discard if cloudy. Grey-market short peptides are regularly mislabelled or underdosed, and self-issued certificates of analysis cannot be independently verified.
Work it out for Prostamax
Safety
Side effects
- Not systematically documented, because no systematic safety research exists - none of the indexed records is a safety or tolerability study 7. An empty side effect profile reflects absence of investigation, not demonstrated safety
- No toxicology, carcinogenicity or reproductive toxicity study appears in the indexed literature
- Reported at user level only, uncontrolled and unverifiable: injection site reactions with the injectable form
Do not use if
- Pregnancy and breastfeeding - no data
- Children and adolescents - no data
- Hypersensitivity to the peptide or, for injectable use, to benzyl alcohol in the diluent
- Caution on principle in anyone with active or past malignancy, including prostate cancer: the central claim made for this peptide is that it de-heterochromatinises chromatin and reactivates silenced genes 23, a process no one has characterised for safety in a living organism, and the marketed target organ is one with a common age-related cancer
Interactions
Not studied. No interaction data of any kind exist for this product 7.
Sources
- [The influence of the peptide bioregulator prostamax on heterochromatin of human lymphocytes in situ]Biofizika (Biophysics), 2004 - Russian-language; thermal denaturation of lymphocyte chromatin
- [Deheterochromatinization of the chromatin in old age induced by oligopeptide bioregulator (Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro)]Georgian Medical News, 2012 - Russian-language; identifies the bioregulator Prostamax as the tetrapeptide Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro and reports sister chromatid exchange and nucleolar organiser region changes
- Effects of short peptides on lymphocyte chromatin in senile subjectsBulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, 2004 - a multi-peptide chromatin study
- Microcalorimetric study of human blood lymphocytes culture at presence of copper, cadmium and prostamaxGeorgian Medical News, 2009
- [The tissue-specific effect of synthetic peptides-biologic regulators in organotypic tissues culture in young and old rats]Advances in Gerontology (Uspekhi Gerontologii), 2006 - Russian-language organ-culture study testing several bioregulator peptides
- Peptides and AgeingNeuro Endocrinology Letters, 2002 - Khavinson; describes the technology for making peptide preparations from tissue extracts and the 'directed synthesis' of short peptides from their amino acid composition
- PubMed search for 'prostamax' - the complete indexed literature, six records, none a clinical trialPubMed
- Publication index of the original research group (primary source, not independent)Khavinson, St Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology