Prostamax (Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro): Peptide Bioregulator Research Overview

Published: August 2026

Prostamax is a synthetic tetrapeptide with the sequence Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro, CAS 473578-47-1, molecular formula C₂₀H₃₃N₅O₉ and a molecular weight of 487.5 g/mol. Four residues is a small molecule by peptide standards – shorter than most of the compounds in this catalog, and short enough that the whole thing is smaller than a single turn of an alpha helix. It belongs to a family of short peptides that came out of the St. Petersburg peptide-bioregulation program, and nearly everything published about it concerns what happens to chromatin in cultured cells rather than anything at the level of an organism.

Molecular Profile

White Market Peptides offers research-grade Prostamax (20 mg) at a 99%+ purity standard, third-party tested for identity and purity. View its Certificate of Analysis (PDF) ↗

One Name, Two Different Substances

Anyone reading around this compound runs into a naming problem almost immediately, and it is worth settling before going further. A large body of older Russian literature describes a prostate preparation called prostatilen, and a related retail preparation called vitaprost. Those are polypeptide complexes extracted from animal prostate tissue – heterogeneous mixtures, not defined molecules. The compound described on this page is a synthetic tetrapeptide of known sequence and known molecular weight.

The two are routinely conflated in secondary writing, including by suppliers, and the conflation runs in a convenient direction: the extract has a clinical literature going back to the early 1990s, and the tetrapeptide does not. Nothing published about the extract can be read as evidence about Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro. For that reason no prostatilen or vitaprost study appears in the reference list below, and none was used in writing this page.

Origins in the Peptide-Bioregulator Program

The peptide comes out of a research program at the St. Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology, summarized at length by Khavinson (2002) in a monograph-length supplement of Neuroendocrinology Letters. The organizing idea of that program is that very short peptides – di-, tri-, and tetrapeptides – act as tissue-specific regulators, with each sequence associated with a particular organ. Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro is the sequence assigned to prostate tissue in that scheme, which is where the trade name comes from.

Khavinson, Kormilets, and Mar’yanovich (2017) later set out the broader framing in Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, presenting short peptides of this class as epigenetic regulators and looking for their sequences in the proteomes of rodents with long and short lifespans. It is worth being precise about the status of that framing: it is the originating group’s interpretive model for their own compounds, not an independently established mechanism, and the experimental work below is what actually constrains what the molecule does.

Chromatin Thermal Stability in Human Lymphocytes

The most physically direct measurement comes from Meskhi and colleagues (2004), who used differential scanning microcalorimetry on human lymphocytes in situ and published in Biofizika. Chromatin in these cells denatures in two resolvable stages, which the authors recorded at 94.4 °C and 105.1 °C, with associated heats of 50.8 and 44.9 J/g DNA. Microcalorimetry is a blunt instrument in one sense – it reports on bulk structure, not on any particular gene – but it has the advantage of measuring the intact material without a reporter construct or a stain.

In the presence of prostamax, both endotherms shifted to lower temperatures, by 2.9 °C and 1.0 °C respectively, and heat was redistributed between them. The authors read the shift as partial relaxation of the 30-nm fiber within the 10-nm filament, that is, a small change in nucleosomal organization rather than a gross unwinding. The effect is modest in magnitude, and the paper describes it as such.

Chromosome-Level Measurements in Cells From Aged Donors

Dzhokhadze and colleagues (2012), writing in Georgian Medical News, took cells from donors aged 75 to 86 and scored three cytogenetic parameters after exposure to the peptide. Sister chromatid exchange rose from 5.9 ± 0.2 per cell in untreated cells to 12.0 ± 0.28 per cell. Silver-positive nucleolar organizer regions rose from 0.95 to 2.5 per cell. Large blocks of pericentromeric heterochromatin on chromosomes 1 and 9 were reduced in frequency.

The authors interpreted this constellation as decondensation and deheterochromatinization – chromatin opening with age-related repression partially lifted – and treated it as the basis of a protective action. That interpretation should be attributed rather than adopted. In conventional cytogenetics, an approximate doubling of sister chromatid exchange is read as a marker of genotoxic stress, since exchanges arise from recombinational repair at stalled or broken replication forks. The same measurement therefore carries two quite different readings depending on the framework brought to it, and the published record here contains one group’s framework applied to one set of experiments. The measured values are the durable part; the interpretation is not settled.

Tissue Specificity in Organotypic Culture

Zakutskii and colleagues (2006) reported in Advances in Gerontology on organotypic explant cultures from young (3-week-old) and aged (18-month-old) rats. Four synthetic peptides from the same class – cardiogen, bronchogen, prostamax, and pancragen – were applied to explants of heart, lung, prostate, and pancreas respectively. At a concentration of 0.05 ng/mL, each peptide was reported to stimulate growth in its matching tissue relative to control explants, in both age groups. That figure is a culture-medium concentration in an explant assay and nothing else; it is not a dose and does not translate to one.

Khavinson and colleagues (2012), in Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, examined the same tissue-specific pattern in the context of cell differentiation in aging cultures. The design of these experiments is what makes the tissue-specificity claim testable at all: the interesting comparison is not peptide versus control, but whether each peptide acts preferentially on its own assigned tissue rather than on the others in the same run. That is the structure of the reported result, and it is the part of this literature most worth attempting to replicate.

Looking to source this compound? Prostamax (20 mg) is available for laboratory research, with documented batch testing. View its Certificate of Analysis (PDF) ↗

What the Evidence Base Does and Does Not Cover

Taken together, the published work on Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro is preclinical and narrow. It consists of biophysical measurements on chromatin in cultured human lymphocytes, cytogenetic scoring in cells from elderly donors, and explant culture in rats. There is no randomized trial of the synthetic peptide, and searching the indexed literature turns up no independent replication of these specific findings outside the originating institutes and their close collaborators.

That is a real limitation and not a rhetorical hedge. A body of work produced largely by one program, much of it published in Russian-language journals with limited circulation, has not been through the adversarial process that establishes a finding. Several of the papers are also brief – three to six pages – with correspondingly limited methodological detail. For a laboratory considering this compound, the practical consequence is that the chromatin measurements above are best treated as hypotheses to test rather than as established properties, and that independent replication of the organotypic result would be more informative than any further reading of the existing literature.

Key Published References

1. Khavinson VKh. Peptides and Ageing. Neuro Endocrinol Lett. 2002;23 Suppl 3:11-144. PMID: 12374906
2. Meskhi T, Khachidze D, Barbakadze Sh, Madzhagaladze G, Gorgoshidze M, Monaselidze D, Lezhava T, Tadumadze N. [The influence of the peptide bioregulator prostamax on heterochromatin of human lymphocytes in situ]. Biofizika. 2004;49(6):1091-1093. PMID: 15612551
3. Zakutskii AN, Chalisova NI, Ryzhak GA, Aniskina AI, Filippov SV, Zeziulin PN. [The tissue-specific effect of synthetic peptides-biologic regulators in organotypic tissues culture in young and old rats]. Adv Gerontol. 2006;19:93-96. PMID: 17152728
4. Khavinson VKh, Linkova NS, Polyakova VO, Kheifets OV, Tarnovskaya SI, Kvetnoy IM. Peptides tissue-specifically stimulate cell differentiation during their aging. Bull Exp Biol Med. 2012;153(1):148-151. PMID: 22808515
5. Dzhokhadze TA, Buadze TZh, Gaiozishvili MN, Baratashvili NA, Lezhava TA. [Deheterochromatinization of the chromatin in old age induced by oligopeptide bioregulator (Lys-Glu-Asp-Pro)]. Georgian Med News. 2012;(212):76-82. PMID: 23221144
6. Khavinson VK, Kormilets DY, Mar’yanovich AT. Peptides (Epigenetic Regulators) in the Structure of Rodents with a Long and Short Lifespan. Bull Exp Biol Med. 2017;163(5):671-676. PMID: 28948547

Product Availability

Prostamax is available from White Market Peptides as Prostamax (20 mg), supplied as a lyophilized powder at 99%+ purity, for laboratory research use only.