How GHK-Cu Was Discovered

GHK-Cu was not designed in a lab. It was found by chance while a researcher was asking why old tissue behaves differently from young tissue.

A Question About Ageing Blood

In the early 1970s, Loren Pickart was studying why liver tissue from older people behaves differently from young tissue. By his later accounts, old tissue exposed to plasma from younger people produced proteins more like young tissue, and he traced part of this effect to a small factor in the plasma. In 1973 the two described it in Nature New Biology as a tripeptide that kept normal liver cells alive longer. The same paper's title noted that it also stimulated the growth of liver tumour cells.

The Copper Connection

While purifying the peptide, Pickart's team saw that it kept appearing together with copper. In 1980 they reported in Nature that the tripeptide readily forms a complex with copper(II) and helps cultured liver cancer cells take up the metal. They pointed out that its structure resembles the copper transport site of albumin. A 1982 study then described how the copper is held in solution.

Collagen and Wounds

In the late 1980s François-Xavier Maquart and colleagues in Reims, France, found that GHK-Cu increased collagen production by fibroblasts at extremely low concentrations. In 1993 the same group showed that injecting it into small wound chambers under the skin of rats increased the build-up of collagen and other connective tissue.

Into Skincare

Over the following decades GHK-Cu moved into commercial skin and hair products under the name copper tripeptide-1, and Pickart himself later ran a skincare research company. Much of the positive human evidence on skin comes from reviews by his group and from company-backed studies.

The Gene Data Era

In 2012 a team from Boston University, the University of British Columbia and Groningen used a large database of drug effects on genes, called the Connectivity Map. They found that GHK could reverse a gene-activity pattern linked to lung damage in emphysema. This reawakened interest in the peptide beyond cosmetics, though it remains a laboratory finding.