Cardiogen

Cardiogen (AEDR, Ala-Glu-Asp-Arg) is a synthetic tetrapeptide attributed to Prof. Vladimir Khavinson's research program at the St. Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology, positioned as the cardiac-tissue-focused member of the institute's "cytogen" line of single-sequence synthetic bioregulator peptides, alongside Vilon (thymus), Livagen (liver), and Epithalon (pineal gland) — all also built on this site.

Chemically, Cardiogen is a four-residue peptide: molecular formula C18H31N7O9, molecular weight approximately 489.49 g/mol, corresponding to PubChem CID 11583989 (listed as H-Ala-Glu-Asp-Arg-OH). We were unable to locate a confirmed CAS registry number for this specific compound across the sources we checked, and we are not including one rather than guess.

At Verified Peptides, we want to be more direct about Cardiogen than about any other Khavinson-associated peptide built on this site so far: after a diligent search across PubMed directly and multiple targeted queries, we could not locate a single PubMed-indexed primary research publication that specifically names Cardiogen or the AEDR sequence. The cardiomyocyte-proliferation and cardiac-recovery claims that circulate widely across vendor and "peptide guide" websites — describing rat and rabbit studies, infarct-size reduction, and cardiomyocyte proliferation in aged cardiac tissue — are consistently attributed to "Khavinson group" research, but we were not able to trace any of these specific claims to a verifiable, independently checkable indexed publication. We present this evidence gap plainly rather than repeating secondhand vendor claims as though they were confirmed findings.

The broader biological backdrop against which Cardiogen's claims are framed is real and independently established: adult mammalian cardiomyocytes have very limited capacity to proliferate and regenerate after birth, a well-documented feature of cardiac biology that makes the heart particularly vulnerable to permanent tissue loss following ischemic injury such as myocardial infarction, and this regenerative limitation is understood to worsen further with age. This general biological problem — that aging and damaged heart tissue cannot easily replace lost cardiomyocytes — is the legitimate scientific backdrop that any cardiomyocyte-proliferation research claim, including those made about Cardiogen, is responding to, even though the specific claim that a four-amino-acid peptide can meaningfully stimulate this proliferation in aged cardiac tissue remains, in Cardiogen's case, unverified against an indexed source.

At Verified Peptides, we think Cardiogen requires the most cautious evidentiary framing of any Khavinson-associated peptide built on this site so far. A broader review by the same research group, "Peptide Regulation of Gene Expression: A Systematic Review" (Khavinson et al., Molecules, 2021, PMID 34834147), is genuinely PubMed-indexed and discusses the general framework by which short 2-7 amino acid peptides are proposed to regulate gene expression, using dipeptide and tetrapeptide examples such as Lys-Glu (Vilon) and Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly (Epithalon's related tetrapeptide). We want to be precise, however, that this review paper does not specifically name or discuss Cardiogen or the AEDR sequence — it is relevant only as background on the broader research program's general methodology and mechanistic framework, not as direct evidence for Cardiogen itself.

Beyond this general background reference, we conducted multiple targeted searches specifically for Cardiogen and AEDR combined with terms like myocardial infarction, cardiomyocyte, ischemia, and Khavinson, and located no PubMed-indexed results. The specific claims repeated across commercial peptide vendor and "research guide" websites — describing rat and rabbit cardiac ischemia models, ECG normalization, infarct-size reduction figures, and aged-cardiomyocyte proliferation studies — are consistently attributed to Khavinson's group but are not, to our knowledge, traceable to any specific, independently verifiable indexed publication.

We think it is important for researchers to understand what this means in practice: Cardiogen's public evidence base, as far as we have been able to verify, consists of unsourced or vendor-repeated claims rather than a citable primary study. This does not necessarily mean the underlying research does not exist — Soviet and Russian-era biomedical research is documented to be unevenly indexed in Western databases — but it does mean we cannot respons‌ibly present Cardiogen's cardiac research claims with the same confidence as compounds in this catalog with a directly verifiable PMID. No FDA, EMA, or other Western regulatory body has evaluated or approved Cardiogen for any indication, and no human clinical trial has been located. At Verified Peptides, we sell research-grade Cardiogen strictly for laboratory research, and we encourage researchers who want to rely on its claimed cardiac effects to seek out and independently verify primary sources before treating any of the specific figures described above as established fact.

Cardiogen's alternate commercial name, "CardioCytogen," used by some vendors, reflects its placement within the "cytogen" (single-sequence synthetic peptide) branch of Khavinson's bioregulator catalog, distinguishing it from the natural multi-peptide "cytomax" complexes such as Glandokort, also built on this site.

Cardiogen is a comparatively late addition to the Khavinson bioregulator catalog relative to earlier, more established cytogens such as Epithalon and Vilon, which may partly explain why its published research footprint, at least as independently verifiable through standard literature search, appears considerably thinner. Newer entries in a decades-spanning research program are not always accompanied by the same volume of published characterization as the program's earliest and most-studied compounds. This catalog's evidence quality genuinely varies compound by compound, even within the same Khavinson research lineage, a pattern researchers should not treat as uniform: Epithalon and Vilon each have multiple independently locatable, PubMed-indexed studies with real PMIDs; Livagen has exactly one; Cardiogen, as far as we have been able to determine through repeated direct search, has none. Presenting all of these compounds under one umbrella of Khavinson peptide bioregulators without distinguishing this real variation in evidentiary depth would understate how differently supported individual compounds within the same research program actually are.

The evidence-availability gap illustrated by Cardiogen is a useful case study in how vendor and "peptide guide" websites can propagate specific, precise-sounding claims (such as exact infarct-size-reduction percentages) without those claims being traceable to any specific, checkable citation. This pattern is common enough across the broader research-peptide commercial space that researchers evaluating any compound — not just Cardiogen — should independently verify specific quantitative claims against a named, indexed source before treating them as established, rather than assuming a confident-sounding vendor description reflects a real underlying publication.

Because Cardiogen shares its general amino-acid-composition style (four residues, drawn from the same small set of amino acids used across several Khavinson cytogens, including Glu and Asp) with several other tetrapeptides in this catalog, researchers should take particular care not to confuse Cardiogen (Ala-Glu-Asp-Arg) with other similarly-constructed sequences such as Livagen (Lys-Glu-Asp-Ala), which share three of four amino acid types but represent entirely distinct, organ-specific compounds.

At Verified Peptides, we require independent third-party HPLC purity testing and mass spectrometry identity confirmation for every batch of research-grade Cardiogen we offer, with a Certificate of Analysis (COA) available for each lot. As a four-residue peptide, Cardiogen is straightforward to synthesize to high purity using standard solid-phase peptide synthesis methods.

We source exclusively from manufacturers operating under Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP)-aligned quality systems, and every lot is independently verified rather than accepted solely on a supplier's internal documentation. Given the unusually limited independently verifiable published research on this specific compound, we think purity and identity verification are, if anything, more important for Cardiogen than for better-documented compounds in this catalog, since researchers have correspondingly less published reference data to sanity-check their own experimental results against.

Lyophilized Cardiogen is stable when stored at -20°C, protected from light and moisture, and researchers can generally expect the unreconstituted peptide to maintain integrity over an extended period under these conditions. At Verified Peptides, we ship lyophilized peptide with appropriate cold-chain packaging to preserve stability in transit.

Once reconstituted with bacteriostatic water or another appropriate sterile diluent, Cardiogen solution should be stored refrigerated at 2–8°C and used within the timeframe indicated on the product's documentation. As with other short peptides in this catalog, reconstituted solutions are generally less stable than the lyophilized form and are more susceptible to degradation and microbial contamination with repeated freeze-thaw cycling.

Researchers should avoid repeated freeze-thaw cycles of reconstituted material and should follow the specific storage guidance provided with each lot's documentation to preserve sample validity for research use.