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Vilon

Also known as KE peptide, Lys-Glu, lysyl-glutamate, Thymogen (as the closely related product name)

Dipeptide from the Russian bioregulator programme, presented as a thymus and immune agent without independent evidence.

preclinical Recovery & tissue research chemical

At a glance

Category
Recovery & tissue
Status
research chemical
Route
intraperitoneal, subcutaneous and intramuscular in the animal work; added directly to medium in the cell culture work; oral or sublingual in the capsule form of the bioregulator line
Half-life
No published pharmacokinetics in humans. A dipeptide with free termini and no protective modification; it is a substrate for ordinary peptidases and plasma survival 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
275.3 g/mol
Sequence
Lys-Glu

Synthetic Vilon is not a registered medicine in the EU or US. It comes from the Khavinson programme at the St Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology, whose capsule products are registered in Russia as food supplements (BAD) under a notification regime with no efficacy assessment - which is not approval as a medicine. PeptideX has not been able to open the Russian register from outside Russia to confirm this, so the registration should be read as an unverified claim rather than an established fact. Some sources conflate Vilon with Thymogen (glutamyl-tryptophan) or with Thymalin, the crude bovine thymus extract; these are chemically different substances with different literatures and should not be treated as interchangeable. Outside Russia, Vilon is traded as a 'research chemical'.

Doping status: Not listed by name; as a non-approved substance it falls under S0 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

Vilon is the dipeptide member of the Khavinson series, presented as the synthetic active fragment of Thymalin, a crude low-molecular-weight extract of the bovine thymus. It occupies the same position relative to Thymalin that Epitalon occupies relative to Epithalamine. The claimed mechanism is the programme's standard one: KE is said to enter the nucleus, associate with promoter DNA and reactivate genes that have become transcriptionally silent with age, thereby restoring lymphocyte proliferation and differentiation and, more broadly, immune competence.

As with the rest of the series, this is a hypothesis and should be labelled as such. A two-residue peptide is the smallest possible unit above a free amino acid and has essentially no capacity for the multi-point contacts that sequence-specific DNA recognition requires in every characterised biological system. The one directly relevant experimental claim - chromatin decondensation in cultured lymphocytes from elderly donors - comes from the originating circle and has not been reproduced independently. What the group's own biophysical work on a sibling peptide showed was DNA binding that was non-specific with respect to base composition, which is consistent with weak electrostatic association rather than gene-selective regulation.

Lys-Glu is also an unremarkable dipeptide from a biochemical standpoint: it is the kind of fragment generated continuously by ordinary protein turnover throughout the body. Any account of why administering more of it would produce a selective effect on the thymus, rather than joining the general amino acid pool, is missing from the literature.

What the research shows

Vilon has a larger indexed footprint than most of this series - several dozen PubMed-listed papers - but that footprint is almost entirely one research group publishing in a narrow set of Russian-affiliated journals. There is no controlled human trial of the synthetic dipeptide, no independent Western replication of any finding, and the animal lifespan and anti-tumour claims come from the same authors who propose the mechanism. There is no basis for stating that Vilon improves immune function in humans.

Research in humans

No controlled clinical trial of synthetic Vilon reporting immune or clinical outcomes was found. The nearest human-derived work is ex vivo: Vilon was reported to induce chromatin reactivation in cultured lymphocytes taken from elderly donors (Biogerontology, 2004), and to alter argyrophilic nucleolar organiser region proteins in co-cultured human thymocytes and thymic epitheliocytes. Both are cell culture using human cells, not studies in people. Human claims that circulate about Vilon are largely transferred from the literature on Thymalin - a different substance, a crude bovine extract - and that transfer is an inference, not a finding.

Animal and lab research

Khavinson and Anisimov (Doklady Biological Sciences, 2000) reported that Vilon inhibited growth of spontaneous tumours and increased lifespan in mice, and a companion paper the same year reported effects on biological age and lifespan 12. Further reports from the same group cover inhibition of chemically induced rat bladder tumours, effects on transforming growth factor-beta and microvascular permeability in experimental chronic renal failure, combined effects with cyclophosphamide on tumour transplants, and gene expression changes in mouse heart assessed by DNA microarray.

Caveats. Every one of the findings above originates with the Khavinson group or affiliated laboratories, published in Doklady Biological Sciences, Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, Advances in Gerontology and Georgian Medical News - venues with limited external scrutiny, and in several cases without accessible English full text. There has been no independent replication in over twenty years. The animal studies do not report randomisation method, allocation concealment or blinding in assessable detail; group sizes are small; outcome measures appear chosen post hoc across a wide range of reported endpoints without a pre-specified primary; and there is no protocol registration. Lifespan and tumour-incidence claims from a single laboratory that also originated the theoretical framework are precisely the situation in which independent replication matters most, and it is absent.

What it is used for

  • Presented as an immune bioregulator and geroprotector - claims the evidence does not support
  • Studied in rodents for spontaneous tumour incidence and lifespan 12 and for chemically induced bladder tumours 4, all by the originating group
  • Used as one of several test peptides in cell culture gene expression 5 and chromatin studies 37
  • Self-administered on the grey market in courses, without a validated indication or dose

Dosing

  • There is no validated human dose. No dose-finding study, no maximum tolerated dose, no human pharmacokinetics and no dose-response curve exist.
  • The rodent studies use microgram quantities per animal on intermittent schedules 12; these cannot be scaled to a human protocol in the absence of any pharmacokinetic data, and attempts to do so on a per-kilogram basis produce figures orders of magnitude below what is sold.
  • The doses circulating in user protocols track the vial size the peptide is sold in rather than any published finding.
  • Leaving this dosing field empty is the accurate answer. The vendor 'course' convention that circulates is recorded in the protocol section below, explicitly as vendor labelling with no published basis rather than as a studied dose.

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

Protocols

Vendor 'course' convention (user-reported)

user protocol — not validated

Source: Vendor product labelling and forum posts; 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.

Injectable courseroughly a 10 to 20 mg vial worked through over a 10 to 20 day course
Capsule/sublingual form (bioregulator line)1 to 3 capsules daily for about 10 to 30 days
Repetitionthe course repeated 2 to 3 times a year in some vendor instructions

These figures come from vendor labelling and forum posts, not from any study. The 10-to-20-day course length and the amount per course simply track the vial size the peptide is sold in and the generic 'course' format the whole Khavinson product line is marketed under; neither has a pharmacokinetic or clinical basis. The rodent studies used microgram quantities per animal that scale to figures orders of magnitude below what is sold 12, so the circulating amounts are not even a scaled-up version of the animal work - they are the vial size, nothing more.

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

Safety

Side effects

  • Not systematically documented in humans, because no systematic human safety research exists. The absence of a side effect profile reflects a lack of research, not demonstrated safety
  • No formal toxicology programme, carcinogenicity study or reproductive toxicity study has been carried out on the synthetic dipeptide
  • Reported at user level, uncontrolled and unverifiable: injection site reactions, transient fatigue, headache

Do not use if

  • Active or past malignancy - the claimed mechanism is reactivation of proliferation and differentiation in lymphoid tissue, and the animal literature deliberately places Vilon in tumour models 14. That it was reported to inhibit spontaneous tumours in mice 1 is not a safety finding in humans, and effects on proliferation are not directionally predictable
  • Autoimmune disease - stimulating immune function is the stated intent, which is the wrong direction in autoimmunity; entirely unstudied
  • Immunosuppressive therapy, including after transplantation - a claimed immunostimulant in someone deliberately immunosuppressed is an obvious concern, with no data. The one published combination study, Vilon with cyclophosphamide on tumour transplants in rodents 6, is a reason for caution around cytotoxic chemotherapy rather than a characterised interaction
  • Pregnancy and breastfeeding - no data
  • Children and adolescents - no data; the thymus is most active in this group and interfering with it has never been studied
  • Hypersensitivity to the peptide or, for injectable use, to benzyl alcohol in bacteriostatic diluent

Interactions

Not studied in humans. The only relevant published work is the report of a combined effect of Vilon and cyclophosphamide on tumour transplants in rodents, which is a reason for caution around cytotoxic chemotherapy rather than a characterised interaction. Interaction with immunosuppressants and immunomodulators is theoretically plausible on the claimed mechanism and completely uncharacterised.

Sources