The GHK-Cu Story: 1973 to 2026 | Ordinary Peptides

The GHK-Cu Story: 1973 to 2026 | Ordinary Peptides
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Wellness & Industry Cosmetic Science History Regulation
Investigative Business / Science Journalism

The Strangest Comeback in Cosmetic Science: How a Forgotten 1973 Discovery Became a $400M Industry

Loren Pickart isolated a copper-binding tripeptide from human plasma in 1973. It sat in the scientific literature, mostly ignored, for fifteen years. Today copper peptides are in over two hundred cosmetic products globally, an injectable research compound on the FDA's Category 2 list, and the subject of TikTok skincare debates with tens of millions of views. The 50-year journey is one of the strangest comebacks in cosmetic science.
2026 · By the Ordinary Peptides Research Team

A Petri Dish in 1973

In a UCSF laboratory in 1973, a doctoral student named Loren Pickart was running a strange experiment. He took plasma from young donors, twenty to twenty-five years old, and added it to liver cells from older donors, sixty to eighty. The old cells, which had been sluggish, started producing proteins at the rate of young tissue. Then he reversed the experiment: plasma from older donors did nothing for young cells. Whatever was carrying the rejuvenation signal was small, was in the plasma, and lost potency with age. Pickart spent the next several months fractionating plasma. He narrowed the active factor down to a peptide. The peptide turned out to be three amino acids long: glycine, histidine, lysine. Bound to a copper ion, it formed a small blue complex. He called it GHK, for the amino acid sequence. The copper-bound version became GHK-Cu. The first publication, by Pickart and his collaborator Marvin Thaler, appeared in Nature New Biology in 1973. A more thorough mechanistic paper, by Pickart, Freedman, Loker, and several co-authors, appeared in Nature in 1980. It clarified that the molecule worked by facilitating copper uptake into cells. The chemistry was elegant. The biology was suggestive. The cosmetic and pharmaceutical implications, in retrospect, were enormous. And then, for about fifteen years, almost nothing happened. Today, copper peptides appear in over two hundred cosmetic products globally. They are an injectable research compound that the FDA placed on its Category 2 list in 2023. They are the subject of TikTok skincare debates with tens of millions of views, of dermatology trade press, and of Vogue and Allure features that take them seriously. The fifty-year journey from Pickart's petri dish to mainstream culture is one of the strangest comebacks in modern cosmetic science. For the chemistry, mechanism, and current research data on GHK-Cu itself, the dedicated reference page is the better source. This article is about how the molecule got here.
A note before going further Nothing in this article is medical advice. GHK-Cu is approved as a topical cosmetic ingredient (INCI: Copper Tripeptide-1) and has a markedly different regulatory status from injectable forms of the same molecule. This piece is editorial coverage of a fifty-year history, not a recommendation for any specific use. For chemistry, evidence, and current regulatory status, see the linked product page.

The Fifteen-Year Silence

Pickart's 1973 paper was published. It was cited. It did not, however, set off the chain of follow-on research that the underlying biology arguably deserved. To understand why, you have to look at what cosmetic science was in the late 1970s. The industry was built on synthetic chemistry. Polymers, surfactants, esters of glycerol, derivatives of vitamin A. Peptides as cosmetic ingredients were considered fragile, expensive, and not viable for mass-market formulations. The supply chain for biologically active peptides was closer to academic research than to consumer manufacturing. A bottle of moisturizer that depended on a three-amino-acid peptide for its claimed effects would have been laughed off a buyer's desk at any major beauty brand in 1978. There was a second problem. The molecule was unpatentable in the traditional sense. GHK is a sequence of three common amino acids that occurs naturally in human plasma. You cannot patent the molecule itself. You can patent specific formulations or delivery systems built around it, but the underlying chemistry is in the public domain. For a pharmaceutical company in the 1980s, weighing whether to fund Phase II trials, that economics was not attractive. For a cosmetic company, looking for ingredients to differentiate against competitors, the same lack of exclusivity was a problem. Pickart kept working. He moved through industry positions, including time as a peptide chemist at Procter & Gamble. He published periodically. The molecule sat in the scientific literature with the patience of something that had nothing else to do. A small but important parallel development was happening in France. Maquart, Borel, and colleagues at the University of Reims independently confirmed Pickart's wound-healing observations in the late 1980s. Their 1988 FEBS Letters paper was an external replication of the kind that scientific reputations are built on. It mattered, but it did not yet change the commercial calculus.

The Renaissance: 1995 to 2005

In 1995, Pickart founded Skin Biology, a small company outside Seattle that began producing topical formulations of his copper peptide. The first product was called, accurately if unimaginatively, "Original Copper Peptide." The company was not large. The product line grew slowly. But Skin Biology became the first proof point that GHK-Cu could be commercialized as a cosmetic ingredient at all. The break came in the early 2000s, when major beauty conglomerates began adopting peptide ingredients more seriously. Two shifts created the opening. First, the cosmetic industry as a whole pivoted toward "scientific" positioning. Customers wanted ingredients with clinical-trial language attached. Peptides, with their published mechanism stories, fit the marketing brief better than yet another vitamin C variant. Second, the anti-aging skincare segment exploded in dollar terms. By the mid-2000s, anti-aging skincare was one of the highest-margin categories in the entire beauty industry, and brands were aggressively differentiating on hero ingredients. Neutrogena's Visibly Firm line, which used copper peptides in its formulations, brought the ingredient into mass-market drugstores in the early 2000s. Estée Lauder's various peptide-based product lines around the same era did the same for the prestige market. NIA24, launched in 2005, used copper peptides as part of its premium positioning. Within five years, copper peptides went from a niche specialty ingredient sold by one Seattle company to a category found across multiple price tiers and retail channels. The clinical evidence base also began to thicken. A 1999 study by Abdulghani and colleagues compared copper peptide formulations to vitamin C and retinoic acid for facial skin effects. A 2005 randomized controlled trial published in Dermatologic Surgery by Leyden and colleagues evaluated a copper peptide eye cream against placebo. Neither study was a definitive end-of-question trial, but together they began to give the molecule something it had lacked: independent published efficacy data, generated outside Pickart's own lab, in study designs that dermatologists recognized as legitimate. The biological narrative being built around the molecule was also acquiring a satisfying numerical anchor. By the early 2000s, multiple labs had documented that GHK plasma levels in healthy adults track strongly with age: roughly 200 ng/mL in young adults around age twenty, declining to about 80 ng/mL by age sixty. That sixty percent reduction over four decades became the headline statistic for the anti-aging marketing built on top of the molecule. It was also, importantly, real data, not a manufactured talking point. For the full clinical evidence catalogue, the GHK-Cu reference page covers it in detail.

The Gene Era: 2010s

The next chapter was driven not by a new clinical trial but by a piece of bioinformatics infrastructure built at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Connectivity Map, released in 2006 and refined throughout the early 2010s, was a large database that mapped how thousands of small molecules altered gene expression in cell lines. The idea was to allow researchers to query a disease's gene-expression signature and find compounds that reversed it. In 2012, Joshua Campbell and colleagues at Boston University, working with collaborators in British Columbia and Pennsylvania, published a paper in Genome Medicine using exactly this approach for emphysema. They derived a gene signature from emphysematous lung tissue and queried the Connectivity Map for compounds that would reverse it. The molecule that came back at the top of the list was GHK. They tested it in fibroblasts from COPD patients and found it produced gene-expression changes consistent with reversal of the emphysema signature. The paper was a serious piece of academic work, published in a respected journal, with no commercial conflict driving the GHK finding. For Pickart, who by this point had been working on his molecule for nearly forty years, the Campbell paper was a vindication. He and his colleague Anna Margolina at Skin Biology then ran their own Connectivity Map analysis, looking at the full set of genes whose expression GHK altered. Their 2014 paper in BioMed Research International, titled "GHK and DNA: Resetting the Human Genome to Health," produced a single statistic that took on a life of its own: GHK altered the expression of 31.2% of human genes by at least 50%, in either direction. That number was, technically speaking, an in silico estimate from the Broad data, not a clinical finding. Pickart and Margolina were careful about that distinction in the original paper. The number was a description of what GHK could do to gene expression patterns in cell lines, not a claim about clinical effects in human patients. Online, the distinction collapsed almost immediately. "GHK modulates 31% of the human genome" became a stock phrase on biohacker forums. Reddit threads cited it without footnotes. Supplement vendors built marketing around it. The original caveat (that this was a computational analysis of cell-line gene expression, not in vivo human clinical efficacy) was almost never carried over into the popular framing. By 2018, when Pickart and Margolina published a broader review in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences covering GHK's actions across multiple tissue systems, the Connectivity Map findings had already entered wellness discourse as established fact.
A useful distinction In silico gene-expression modulation is a computational signal that a compound can plausibly affect a wide range of biology. It is not a clinical trial. The leap from "alters expression of many genes in cell lines" to "treats many diseases in patients" is the leap that drug development is built on, and it is much harder than it sounds. The GHK research community has continued to do the harder work; it just gets fewer TikTok views than the original 31.2% headline.

The Injectable Era and the Regulatory Bifurcation

By the early 2020s, GHK-Cu had become a fixture of the wellness peptide industry. The chemistry that had been quietly used in topical creams for thirty years was now being repackaged as a research-grade injectable, sold by online vendors with the standard "for laboratory use only" disclaimer. Med spas and telehealth clinics began offering it as part of "GLOW" protocols (typically GHK-Cu paired with BPC-157 and TB-500), with cycle pricing in the $200 to $450 range. We have written separately about the marketing playbook behind GLOW and adjacent protocols; the short version is that the injectable use case grew fast, the clinical evidence for injectable GHK-Cu grew much more slowly, and the gap between the two was filled with brand storytelling. In September 2023, the FDA published an updated 503A bulks list that did something unusual for the agency: it bifurcated GHK-Cu by route of administration. Topical GHK-Cu was placed on Category 1, meaning compounding pharmacies could continue to prepare it for topical use. Injectable GHK-Cu was placed on Category 2, meaning compounding pharmacies could not legally prepare it for injection. The reasoning the agency provided focused on safety risks specific to injectable administration: immunogenicity, impurity concerns, the absence of formal human pharmacokinetic data, and the lack of any IND-cleared trial in injectable use. The split mattered commercially. The cosmetic industry continued completely unaffected; topical formulations remained legal, sold across drugstore and prestige channels at scale. The wellness peptide industry, which had been pushing GHK-Cu as part of injectable protocols, ran into the same regulatory wall that was being built around BPC-157 and TB-500. As before, the market routed around the regulation. Research-only sellers picked up the slack. Overseas suppliers shipped product to U.S. customers under research-chemical labels. The disclaimer-protected channel that we documented in the GLOW piece absorbed most of the volume. Pickart, who is now in his eighties and still publishing, has been on record at his company's blog as skeptical of injectable GHK-Cu use. His public position is that topical and oral routes have decades of safety data and a clearer mechanism story; injectable use, in his view, is a separate question that has not been adequately answered. This is a notable position for the molecule's discoverer to take while the wellness industry is energetically commercializing the form he has reservations about.

2026: The Regulation Moves Again

In February 2026, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on the Joe Rogan Experience and announced his intent to remove fourteen of the nineteen Category 2 peptides back to Category 1, where compounding would again be permitted. He framed the original FDA decision as an overreach. In April 2026, the FDA followed through on a procedural mechanism. Twelve peptides came off Category 2 because their original nominators withdrew their nominations. At the same time, the FDA removed GHK-Cu from Category 1 of the topical/non-injectable list, indicating it would consult the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC) before February 2027 about whether it should formally be added to the bulks list. Translation: GHK-Cu's regulatory status, which had been the rare clear case in 503A peptide compounding (topical permitted, injectable not), is now under active reconsideration on both sides. Whether GHK-Cu fares well in the PCAC review is genuinely uncertain. The molecule has stronger arguments than most peptides in this conversation. It is endogenous. It has fifty years of cumulative scientific literature. It has a clean topical safety record across thousands of cosmetic products. It is not on the WADA prohibited list, unlike BPC-157, TB-500, or MOTS-c. The agency has reviewers who have followed the molecule for a long time. Working against it: the same fact that gave Pickart his 31.2% headline is now a regulatory hazard. A compound that modulates roughly a third of human genes is, from an FDA reviewer's perspective, a compound whose off-target effects in humans are very hard to predict from preclinical data. Cosmetic regulation does not have to answer that question. Pharmaceutical regulation does. The PCAC meeting will be the most consequential regulatory moment for this molecule since 2023.

Where This Goes Next

Three things to watch over the next eighteen months. Cosmetic industry consolidation around delivery technology. Topical GHK-Cu is mature. The remaining commercial differentiation is in delivery: nanoencapsulation, ionic liquid microemulsions, transdermal patches, microneedle systems. A 2023 paper by Liu and colleagues in Bioactive Materials reported significantly improved skin penetration of GHK-Cu via ionic liquid microemulsion formulation. This is the kind of work that suggests where the next wave of premium copper-peptide skincare products is going to come from. Expect formulation patents from L'Oréal, Estée Lauder, Shiseido, and the Korean K-beauty conglomerates over the next two years. Hair growth as the legitimacy bridge. A 2022 randomized controlled trial in androgenetic alopecia patients reported that topical copper peptide outperformed minoxidil on hair count metrics. The trial was small and short, but the result was striking enough that several follow-on studies are now underway. Hair growth is a category where the FDA already approves products for over-the-counter use (minoxidil), so the regulatory pathway for a copper-peptide product is much shorter than for, say, a Phase III emphysema indication. Hair growth is the most plausible route by which GHK-Cu earns mainstream prescription-status legitimacy in this decade. The PCAC decision and the Pickart succession question. Pickart is in his eighties. The next generation of GHK research is being done by groups that are not Skin Biology and that are at universities (BU, UCLA, multiple Chinese and European institutions). The molecule's scientific future is increasingly independent of its discoverer, which is healthy, but the institutional advocacy that often matters in regulatory contexts is more diffuse than it would be if there were a single corporate sponsor pushing for an indication. Whoever underwrites the eventual Phase II or Phase III trial will be the company that ends up owning the commercial future of injectable copper peptides, if there is one.

The Bottom Line

GHK-Cu is a case study in how slowly science moves through commercial systems. Discovery in 1973. First independent replication in 1988. Mainstream cosmetic adoption in 1995 to 2005. Gene-era reframing in 2012 to 2018. Mainstream cultural moment in 2024 to 2026. Fifty-one years from the petri dish to the TikTok hashtag. The story is also a case study in what makes molecules commercially successful or unsuccessful in modern medicine. GHK-Cu had the science from 1973. It did not have the marketing infrastructure, the patent economics, or the regulatory framework until much later. Naming, branding, regulatory environment, and influencer attention turn out to matter approximately as much as the biology, which is a sobering thing to write but is hard to argue with looking at the timeline. Loren Pickart isolated GHK-Cu in 1973 expecting it to become a wound-healing drug within a decade. That is not what happened. Instead, the molecule wandered through cosmetic counters, biohacker forums, and TikTok feeds before mainstream science was ready to take it seriously. By the time it reaches a Phase III trial, if it ever does, the cosmetic industry will have been selling it for over fifty years.
Editorial Disclosure Ordinary Peptides supplies research-grade GHK-Cu as a laboratory compound. This article is editorial coverage of copper peptides as a scientific and cultural history, not promotion of any specific product. For the chemistry, evidence base, and current regulatory status of GHK-Cu, see the linked reference page. For the broader category of regenerative research peptides, see the regenerative peptides section.
Sources & Further Reading
  1. Pickart L, Thaler MM. "Tripeptide in human serum which prolongs survival of normal liver cells and stimulates growth in neoplastic cells." Nature New Biology. 1973;243:85-87.
  2. Pickart L, Freedman JH, Loker WJ, et al. "Growth-modulating plasma tripeptide may function by facilitating copper uptake into cells." Nature. 1980;288:715-717.
  3. Maquart FX, Pickart L, Laurent M, et al. "Stimulation of collagen synthesis in fibroblast cultures by the tripeptide-copper complex glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine-Cu²⁺." FEBS Letters. 1988;238:343-346.
  4. Abdulghani AA, Sherr S, Shirin S, et al. Effects of topical creams containing vitamin C, vitamin E, GHK-Cu, and retinoic acid. Disease Management & Clinical Outcomes. 1998.
  5. Leyden JJ, et al. "Skin care benefits of copper peptide containing eye creams." Presented at AAD 2002; published Dermatol Surg 2005.
  6. Campbell JD, McDonough JE, Zeskind JE, et al. "A gene expression signature of emphysema-related lung destruction and its reversal by the tripeptide GHK." Genome Medicine. 2012;4(8):67. genomemedicine.biomedcentral.com
  7. Pickart L, Vasquez-Soltero JM, Margolina A. "GHK and DNA: Resetting the Human Genome to Health." BioMed Research International. 2014;2014:151479. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
  8. Pickart L, Margolina A. "Regenerative and Protective Actions of the GHK-Cu Peptide in the Light of the New Gene Data." Int J Mol Sci. 2018;19(7):1987. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  9. Liu T, et al. Ionic liquid microemulsion for transdermal GHK-Cu delivery. Bioactive Materials. 2023;32:502-513.
  10. Park YM, et al. Copper tripeptide vs. minoxidil RCT in androgenetic alopecia. Exp Dermatol. 2022.
  11. FDA. "Bulk Drug Substances Nominated for Use in Compounding Under Section 503A." Updated 2023, 2026. fda.gov
  12. Orrick. "FDA Announces Removal of 12 Peptides from Category 2 and Schedules PCAC Meetings." April 2026. orrick.com
  13. Restore Health Consulting. "FDA Adds Several Peptides to Category 2 Bulks List." 2023. restorehealthconsulting.com
  14. Skin Biology corporate history. skinbiology.com
  15. WADA Prohibited List 2026. wada-ama.org
Editorial Desk · All external links open in a new tab · 2026