Origins and History

Epitalon grew out of a research programme that started in the Soviet Union and is still running in St Petersburg today.

Extracts From Glands

In the 1970s, military doctors in Leningrad, among them Vladimir Khavinson and Vyacheslav Morozov, began to test extracts taken from animal organs. Their theory was that each organ contains short peptides that help regulate its own cells, and that these signals fade with age. By the early 1980s they were reporting longer lifespans in mice treated with extracts of the thymus and the pineal gland.

Epithalamin

The pineal extract was named epithalamin. Over the following years it was given to fruit flies, mice and rats, and later tested in older people at the Institute of Gerontology in Kyiv. Those human studies used the extract, not Epitalon, a difference that is often lost online.

A Simpler Molecule

An extract is a mixture, and its contents can vary from batch to batch. The team therefore analysed which amino acids epithalamin contained and assembled a short peptide from them: Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly. It was named Epitalon, and the first papers on it appeared around the year 2000, starting with experiments in fruit flies.

The Telomere Moment

In 2003 the group reported that Epitalon switched on telomerase in human fetal fibroblasts, a type of connective tissue cell that normally lacks it, and that their telomeres grew longer. A year later they reported that ageing cells of this kind made about ten extra divisions when treated. These two short reports are still the most quoted Epitalon papers.

Found in the Gland Itself

For years Epitalon was described as a synthetic design. In 2017 Khavinson's team reported that they had detected the AEDG sequence among the tetrapeptides of the pineal extract, which supports the idea that it occurs in nature.

Interest Beyond Russia

Since about 2019, groups in Italy, China, the UK and elsewhere have started their own experiments on stem cells, egg cells and telomeres. In 2025 researchers at the Medical University of Warsaw published a broad review, and a team at Brunel University London published independent telomere measurements.