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GHK-Cu 50 mg
Peptide Library · Profile
GHK-Cu 50 mg
Every human study of GHK-Cu ever published put it on the skin. This is a vial for injection, and 7.9 mg of what is inside it is elemental copper — a metal the gut spends all day regulating, which injection goes around. That is the whole of this page: the arithmetic of the copper, and the fact that nobody has ever measured it in a person.
Molecular weight401.9Da · 1:1 complex, C14H22CuN6O4
Copper by mass15.8%7.9 mg elemental copper per vial
Human studies by injectionNoneany route, any endpoint, ever published
Human evidence that existsTopicalcreams, gels, post-laser skin care
The short version
Plain English first. Everything below this section is the same material with the sources, the numbers and the caveats attached.
What it is
A three-amino-acid peptide bound to a copper atom. 15.8% of it by mass is elemental copper — 7.9 mg per vial.
What has actually been measured
Real human evidence exists, and every bit of it put the compound on the skin — creams, gels, post-laser care.
What has not been measured
Injection. No published human study has injected it by any route, for any endpoint, ever.
What most people get wrong
Assuming the skin evidence carries over. It also means injecting a metal the gut spends all day regulating — by a route that goes around the gut entirely.
What GHK-Cu is
GHK is a three-residue peptide — glycine, histidine, lysine — that occurs naturally in human plasma. GHK-Cu is that peptide holding a copper(II) ion. It is a metal complex, not a plain peptide, and almost everything unusual about it follows from the metal.
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Free peptide (GHK) | C14H24N6O4, 340.38 Da · CAS 49557-75-7 |
| Copper complex (GHK-Cu) | C14H22CuN6O4, 401.91 Da · CAS 89030-95-5 |
| Copper, atomic weight | 63.546 |
| Copper as a fraction of the complex | 15.81% by mass |
| Elemental copper in a 50 mg vial | 7.9 mg |
| Cosmetic name | INCI Copper Tripeptide-1 |
Chemical databases do not fully agree on this compound. The figures above are the 1:1 neutral complex, which is the convention the trade uses. PubChem also carries a 2:1 peptide-to-copper record, which would put copper nearer 8.5% of the mass. We have stated which convention we are using so the number can be checked rather than taken on faith.
Permitted in cosmetics is not the same thing as an approved drug
GHK-Cu is a familiar cosmetic ingredient, and people reasonably read that as a clean bill of health. It is not one. Cosmetic ingredient lists — Health Canada's Hotlist, the EU annexes — are prohibition instruments. An ingredient is not approved; it is simply not banned, and the manufacturer carries the safety burden.
So the absence of GHK-Cu from a cosmetics prohibition list means one thing only: not prohibited for topical cosmetic use. It carries no finding of efficacy, no finding of safety, and it says nothing whatsoever about injecting it. A cosmetic clearance and a drug approval are different legal objects and neither is evidence for the other.
How it is said to work
The mechanistic case for GHK-Cu is that it is a copper shuttle: it binds copper(II) with an affinity that lets it hand the metal to and from other proteins, and copper is a cofactor for enzymes involved in collagen cross-linking and angiogenesis. That much is ordinary biochemistry and is not in dispute.
The claim you will have seen: "GHK modulates over 4,000 human genes"
This is real, it is specific, and it is worth knowing exactly what it is before you weigh it.
The number comes from a 2014 paper by Pickart and colleagues. They did not run an experiment. They pulled archived microarray data out of the Broad Institute's Connectivity Map — a public repository of gene expression profiles — and re-analysed it. In their own words, the repository "contains three gene expression profiles for GHK." Two of those three were run on PC3, a prostate cancer cell line. The third was run on MCF7, a breast cancer cell line.
| What people say | What was actually done |
|---|---|
| "Modulates over 4,000 genes" | 2,686 genes up and 1,508 down — 4,194 — counting anything that moved by 50% or more |
| "In human cells" | Three archived array profiles: two PC3 prostate cancer, one MCF7 breast cancer |
| "Study shows" | A computational re-analysis of somebody else's stored data, in a journal not indexed in PubMed |
| "At physiological concentration" | Micromolar — 1 µM, roughly a thousand-fold above plasma GHK |
A 50% expression change is a low bar, and 31.2% of the genome clearing it is the kind of result that usually means a cell is responding to a general stress rather than to a specific signal. None of this makes the finding false. It makes it a hypothesis about cultured cancer cells, which is a long way from a claim about a person.
A 2026 review in Pharmaceutics that we found independently describes claims of this kind as "broad gene-resetting narratives" and "hypothesis-generating," and notes they lack robust human validation. We agree with that characterisation, which is why the number appears on this page with its methods attached rather than as a headline.
Pharmacokinetics
There is no pharmacokinetic data for injected GHK-Cu in a human being. Not thin — none.
The most recent comprehensive review of the compound states the position plainly, and it is worth quoting because it is a review that is broadly sympathetic to GHK-Cu:
"Formal absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion studies of the intact complex — including radiolabel or stable-isotope mass balance that tracks peptide and copper separately — have not been reported."
The phrase to notice is "tracks peptide and copper separately." With an ordinary peptide there is one thing to follow. Here there are two, they can come apart, and they have completely different fates in the body: the peptide is cleared like a peptide, and the copper is a metal that the liver handles, binds to ceruloplasmin, and excretes in bile. Nobody has followed either one after an injection.
Endogenous GHK is present in human plasma and declines with age — that is the observation the whole field started from. It says nothing about what a milligram-scale injected dose does, because the endogenous concentrations are nanomolar and the injected ones are not.
What the evidence shows
Every published human study of GHK-Cu is topical. We looked hard for an exception and there is not one.
No human study of GHK-Cu by any injected route has ever been published
Not subcutaneous, not intramuscular, not intravenous, not intradermal. Not for efficacy, not for safety, not for pharmacokinetics, not for anything. The registered trial that is currently recruiting — NCT07437586, run by Hudson Biotech — is a 0.1% topical gel for acute skin wounds. The topical literature is the literature.
The cleanest controlled human trial, reported honestly
Miller, Wagner, Baack and Eisbach, 2006, in Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery. Thirteen patients completed, randomised to a post-treatment skin care regimen with or without GHK-Cu after circumoral CO2 laser resurfacing, with blinded evaluators and computer-assisted image analysis. Verbatim from the conclusions:
"Copper tripeptide complex (GHK-Cu) skin care products placed on CO2 laser–resurfaced skin offered no significant reduction or resolution of posttreatment erythema. Objective evaluation found no significant improvement in wrinkles or overall skin quality. However, patient satisfaction was significantly higher for those who used GHK-Cu skin care products after CO2 laser skin resurfacing."
Read that fairly in both directions. Every objective endpoint was negative — and GHK-Cu was not worse than the comparator on any of them. The one endpoint that favoured it was patient satisfaction, at P = .04, which is a real result in a thirteen-patient trial and also exactly the sort of endpoint that unblinded expectation moves. We are not going to tell you that finding is nothing. We are going to tell you it is a subjective endpoint in thirteen people using a face cream.
What that leaves
A topical wound-healing programme from the 1990s (the ProCyte Iamin and GraftCyte products), small topical cosmetic studies, and skin-penetration work done on excised human skin in a laboratory rather than on living people. It is a reasonable body of evidence for a cream. It is not evidence for an injection, and it was never meant to be.
Reconstitution
A 50 mg vial. GHK-Cu reconstitutes to a distinctly blue solution — that colour is the copper complex and it is expected, not a fault. It will stain fabric.
| Bacteriostatic water | Concentration | 1 unit (U-100) = | 2 mg draw |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 mL | 25 mg/mL | 250 mcg | 8 units · 0.08 mL |
| 3 mL | 16.7 mg/mL | 167 mcg | 12 units · 0.12 mL |
| 5 mL | 10 mg/mL | 100 mcg | 20 units · 0.20 mL |
At 2 mL the whole dose is eight marks on a U-100 syringe, and a one-mark error is a 12% dose error. More diluent buys precision here, which is why the 3 and 5 mL rows are on the table at all — check your vial has the headroom before drawing up 5 mL.
A 50 mg vial at a nominal 2 mg a day is 25 days — just inside the 28-day window bacteriostatic water's preservative is validated for. One vial, one course, no leftovers to keep. The supply planner will work it out for whatever schedule you are actually using.
Reported protocols
The circulating figure is 1 to 2 mg a day. It has no human clinical basis at all, and tracing where it does come from is worth five minutes of your time.
The citation everyone points to is US Patent 5,164,367, "Method of using copper(II) containing compounds to accelerate wound healing" — Loren Pickart, assigned to ProCyte Corp, filed 1990, granted 17 November 1992. We read it.
| What the patent actually specifies | Species and route |
|---|---|
| 0.1 mL of 10 mg/mL — about 1 mg | Rats, intramuscular |
| 0.1 mg in 0.1 mL | Mice, intramuscular |
| 1.0 mL of 30 mg/mL | Pigs, intramuscular |
| Stated range, 0.01 to 20 mg per kg body weight | Unspecified |
| Human doses | None. The patent gives none. |
So the "1 to 2 mg a day" convention is a rat's intramuscular dose, adopted whole as a human dose, without a body-weight conversion and without anyone checking. A rat is about 300 grams.
The person whose data it is estimated a dose 100 times higher
Pickart published a human estimate himself, in BioMed Research International in 2014. Verbatim: "we estimate about 100–200 mgs of GHK will produce therapeutic actions in humans."
That is not us cherry-picking a wild number — it is the originating researcher's own published figure, from intraperitoneal rat work, and it is two orders of magnitude above what the market sells. The honest summary is that the injectable dose for this compound is unmoored in both directions: the common convention has no derivation, and the one published derivation nobody follows. If a vendor quotes you a dose with confidence, ask what it is based on.
Storage
Lyophilised, sealed, cold, dark and dry. The handling conventions in our storage guide apply, and as with every compound in this library they are conventions carried across from peptides generally rather than published stability data for this specific complex.
Reconstituted, the limiting figure is the 28 days the benzyl alcohol preservative in bacteriostatic water is validated for. At a nominal 2 mg a day a 50 mg vial runs out at day 25, so the two constraints land in almost the same place. Our FAQs explain where the 28-day figure comes from.
Do not freeze a reconstituted solution, and keep it out of the light. This is a metal complex: the useful molecule is copper held in a specific coordination geometry by three amino acids, and anything that breaks that geometry leaves you with a peptide and a loose copper ion. Neither the vial nor the colour will tell you it has happened.
Reported effects
There is no human adverse event dataset for injected GHK-Cu, because there is no human injection dataset of any kind. What there is instead is arithmetic, and it is worth doing.
The copper arithmetic
GHK-Cu is 15.8% elemental copper by mass. So:
| Figure | Copper | Route |
|---|---|---|
| 2 mg GHK-Cu, once daily | 316 mcg/day | Injected |
| FDA-approved parenteral copper for adults (Tralement) | 300 mcg/day | Intravenous |
| ASPEN recommendation, adult parenteral nutrition | 300–500 mcg/day | Intravenous |
| US RDA, adults | 900 mcg/day | Oral |
| US Tolerable Upper Intake Level, adults | 10 mg/day | Oral |
| EFSA Acceptable Daily Intake, since Jan 2023 | 0.07 mg/kg — about 4.9 mg at 70 kg | Oral |
The number is not alarming. What is missing around it is.
A 2 mg daily dose delivers 316 micrograms of copper parenterally, which lands essentially exactly on the adult parenteral copper allowance that clinicians use in intravenous nutrition. That is not a scare figure. It is a full day's supervised parenteral copper, once a day, every day.
The word doing the work is supervised. The clinicians giving 300 micrograms of parenteral copper monitor serum copper and ceruloplasmin, and they reduce the dose in liver or biliary impairment, in renal insufficiency, and in Wilson's disease. Nobody injecting GHK-Cu is doing any of that, and the oral upper limits above — the ones that sound comfortingly large — do not apply, because the gut is the organ that regulates copper absorption and injection bypasses it entirely.
Who should not be near this
Anyone with Wilson's disease or another copper-handling disorder, and anyone with significant liver or biliary disease, in whom the body's copper excretion route is already compromised. These are the same populations parenteral nutrition guidelines single out for dose reduction and monitoring. There is no version of this compound that is copper-free.
What is not known
Whether daily injected GHK-Cu accumulates copper over a long course. Whether the complex stays intact in plasma or hands its copper straight to albumin. What the serum copper looks like at any point after a dose. Every one of those is answerable with a small study that nobody has run.
Regulatory status
Approval. We could not identify any approved drug product containing GHK-Cu, by any route, in any jurisdiction. We are stating it that way rather than as "not approved anywhere in the world," because the second is an unbounded negative and no source states it.
United States. GHK-Cu appears on the FDA's bulk drug substances page, in the table of substances nominated but withdrawn — entries "previously in category 2 of the interim policies" that "were withdrawn by the nominators." Two things about the row are worth knowing. The entry is route-scoped: it reads "GHK-Cu (for injectable routes of administration)." And the rationale is stated verbatim: "Compounded injectable drugs containing GHK-Cu may pose risk for immunogenicity due to the potential for aggregation and peptide-related impurities."
You may see this described as an FDA restriction that permits every route except injection. It is not that. It is a nomination that the nominator withdrew, so no current FDA determination is in force either way — but the concern FDA put on the record was specifically about the injectable route, and a withdrawn nomination is not a safety clearance.
Canada. Two things, both recent, both direct.
Health Canada's public advisory of 9 April 2026 — "Think twice before injecting peptides bought online" — names GHK-Cu among fourteen peptides given as "examples of unauthorized injectable peptide drugs seized by Health Canada." The advisory states that peptides function as prescription drugs in Canada, and addresses the research-use label directly: products marked "For Research Use Only" are not thereby legal or exempt from regulatory requirements.
Then, on 7 May 2026, Health Canada published a Type I recall — reference RA-82047 — of GHK-Cu and BPC-157 powders sold by Xenex Laboratories Inc. of Coquitlam, British Columbia, distributed to compounding and community pharmacies nationally. Five lots of each. The stated reason, verbatim: "Products sold are unauthorized active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs)." Type I is Health Canada's most serious recall class. We are putting a Canadian enforcement action against a Canadian supplier of this exact substance on this page because you should have it, not because we were asked to.
Cosmetics. Copper Tripeptide-1 is a long-standing cosmetic ingredient. As set out at the top of this page, that is a permission to formulate a topical product, not a drug approval, and it does not transfer to any injected use.
Sport. GHK-Cu is not named on the 2026 WADA Prohibited List — we read the list and searched it for "GHK", "copper peptide" and "copper tripeptide". Absence is not permission. Section S0 prohibits at all times "any pharmacological substance which is not addressed by any of the subsequent sections of the List and with no current approval by any governmental regulatory health authority for human therapeutic use." Cosmetic permissibility is not approval for human therapeutic use, so it does not take GHK-Cu out of S0. An athlete should treat it as prohibited.
Sentient Biogenix supplies GHK-Cu for laboratory research use only. It is not for human or veterinary use.
Questions we actually get
Isn't GHK-Cu the copper peptide that's in all the skin creams?
Yes, and that is the point. The creams are where the human evidence is. This is a vial for injection, and no human study of GHK-Cu by any injected route has ever been published.
Is the blue colour normal?
Yes. That is the copper complex, and it is what the solution is supposed to look like. It also stains fabric, so mind what you set the vial down on.
How much copper am I actually injecting?
15.8% of the mass of the compound. A 2 mg dose is 316 micrograms of elemental copper, and a 50 mg vial holds 7.9 mg of it. For scale, the parenteral copper dose clinicians give in intravenous nutrition is 300 to 500 micrograms a day — with serum copper monitoring attached. The oral upper limits you will find online are much higher and do not apply here, because the gut regulates copper absorption and an injection goes around the gut.
Where does the 1–2 mg dose come from?
A 1992 patent, in which about 1 mg was injected intramuscularly into rats. No body-weight conversion was ever done. The researcher behind that patent later published a human estimate of 100 to 200 mg — a hundred times higher. Both numbers cannot be right and neither has been tested in a person.
Does it really switch on 4,000 genes?
The paper reports 4,194 genes moving by 50% or more. That came from re-analysing three archived microarray profiles that somebody else had run — two on a prostate cancer cell line, one on a breast cancer cell line — not from an experiment on a person or an animal. It is an interesting hypothesis, published in a journal that PubMed does not index.
Should anyone avoid it outright?
Anyone with Wilson's disease or another copper-handling disorder, and anyone with significant liver or biliary disease. Those are the same groups clinical guidelines flag for reduced copper in parenteral nutrition, and there is no copper-free version of this compound.
References
- Miller TR, Wagner JD, Baack BR, Eisbach KJ. Effects of topical copper tripeptide complex on CO2 laser–resurfaced skin. Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery 2006;8(4):252–59. PMID 16847171. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov — the thirteen-patient randomised trial, blinded evaluators, and the verbatim conclusions quoted above.
- Pickart L, Vasquez-Soltero JM, Pickart FD, Majnarich J. GHK, the human skin remodeling peptide, induces anti-cancer expression of numerous caspase, growth regulatory, and DNA repair genes. Journal of Analytical Oncology 2014;3(2):79–87. neoplasiaresearch.com — the source of the gene count, the Connectivity Map methods, and the PC3 and MCF7 cell lines. This journal is not indexed in PubMed.
- Pickart L, Vasquez-Soltero JM, Margolina A. GHK and DNA: resetting the human genome to health. BioMed Research International 2014;2014:151479. PMID 25302294. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov — contains the authors' own human dose estimate of 100 to 200 mg.
- Pickart LR. Method of using copper(II) containing compounds to accelerate wound healing. US Patent 5,164,367, assigned to ProCyte Corp; filed 26 March 1990, granted 17 November 1992. patents.google.com — the rat, mouse and pig intramuscular doses, and the absence of any human dose.
- Mateescu D-M, et al. GHK-Cu as a bioactive metallopeptide and drug-delivery cargo: coordination chemistry, formulation science, therapeutic evidence, and a translational roadmap. Pharmaceutics 2026;18(9):1077. mdpi.com — the verbatim ADME statement, the tally of human evidence as topical only, and the characterisation of the gene-expression claims.
- Institute of Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes — copper chapter, 2001. RDA 900 mcg/day; Tolerable Upper Intake Level 10 mg/day, oral, critical endpoint liver damage. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- EFSA Scientific Committee. Re-evaluation of the existing health-based guidance values for copper and exposure assessment from all sources. EFSA Journal 2023;21(1):e07728, published 17 January 2023 — establishes an Acceptable Daily Intake of 0.07 mg/kg body weight, replacing the earlier 5 mg/day upper level. efsa.europa.eu
- American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition. Appropriate dosing for parenteral nutrition — adult parenteral copper 0.3 to 0.5 mg/day; and the ASPEN parenteral nutrition trace element practice tool, 27 November 2023, for the associated monitoring. nutritioncare.org
- US Food and Drug Administration. Certain bulk drug substances for use in compounding that may present significant safety risks — the nominated-but-withdrawn table. fda.gov
- Health Canada. Think twice before injecting peptides bought online: unauthorized products can seriously harm you. Public advisory, 9 April 2026. recalls-rappels.canada.ca
- Health Canada. GHK-Cu & BPC-157 powder: unauthorized active pharmaceutical ingredients. Type I recall, reference RA-82047, published 7 May 2026. recalls-rappels.canada.ca
- World Anti-Doping Agency. The 2026 Prohibited List, in force 1 January 2026, section S0 — non-approved substances. Read via the Austrian Federal Law Gazette's official reproduction (BGBl. III Nr. 219/2025) because WADA blocks automated access to its own copy.
Two things we could not verify and have therefore not printed: the GHK-Cu product concentration used in the 2006 trial, which is not in the abstract and sits behind a paywall; and the specific entries for Copper Tripeptide-1 in Health Canada's Cosmetic Ingredient Hotlist and the EU CosIng database, neither of which we could retrieve in full. The cosmetic versus drug distinction on this page does not depend on either.
For laboratory research use only. Not for human or veterinary use. Nothing on this page is dosing guidance, and no figure here should be read as a recommendation.