[This article was originally published on Dan Elton's blog, More is Different.]
Cerebrolysin is an unregulated medical product made from enzymatically digested pig brain tissue. Hundreds of scientific papers claim that it boosts BDNF, stimulates neurogenesis, and can help treat numerous neural diseases. It is widely used by doctors around the world, especially in Russia and China.
A recent video of Bryan Johnson injecting Cerebrolysin has over a million views on X and 570,000 views on YouTube. The drug, which is advertised as a “peptide combination”, can be purchased easily online and appears to be growing in popularity among biohackers, rationalists, and transhumanists. The subreddit r/Cerebrolysin has 3,100 members.
Unfortunately, our investigation indicates that the... (read 5038 more words →)
Thank you for this additional information! I had not heard of cyclic peptides. To my knowledge, no one has intentionally looked for cyclic peptides in cerebrolysin. However, I think it's pretty unlikely. From what I read about cyclic peptides, they are either derived from natural sources (SFTI-1) or they are synthesized (as in this paper). Synthesizing cyclic peptides involves multiple steps just to get everything to fold correctly. So, it seems unlikely that the random cleavage of brain proteins that occurs in Cerebrolysin synthesis would yield any cyclic peptides.