The Biochemist and the Blue Copper Tripeptide

On his eighteenth birthday, a boy born in Winona, Minnesota, and raised working on a dairy farm sold the only things he owned — his books — and joined the Army 5. The Army trained him as an engineer and put him to work alongside engineers and scientists on DECCA, a radio navigation system. He came out, took degrees in chemistry and mathematics at the University of Minnesota, worked in an atherosclerosis research laboratory there, and went on to a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. The title of his dissertation was A TriPeptide from Human Serum. He was Loren Pickart, and when he died in December 2023, at eighty-five, that tripeptide was still the centre of his working life 5.

Pickart is the biochemist who isolated GHK — glycine, histidine, lysine — from human plasma, reported in 1973 1, and the person who, more than anyone, carried it from that finding into commerce. His route ran from the thesis to a Seattle research institute where the copper connection emerged, to a public company founded to sell wound-care and hair products, to a 1996 clearance that let that company market a copper-peptide gel as a wound dressing but not as a healing drug, and finally to a skincare business he ran with his wife. The experiment that started it all — liver cells kept in young and old serum — is told in a companion piece on this site. This is the story of the man, and of the path by which a research molecule became a cosmetics ingredient.

A thesis with a molecule in it

The discovery itself is quickly told, because it is told in full elsewhere. Working at UCSF, Pickart traced an activity in human serum down to a tripeptide, and the 1973 paper reported that it prolonged the survival of normal liver cells and stimulated growth in neoplastic liver 1. What matters for this story is less the experiment than the fact that it was a doctoral student's. Most people who isolate something as graduate students publish it and move on. Pickart did not move on for fifty years.

It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. A research career normally follows questions, and the molecules change as the questions do. His followed one molecule, and the questions changed around it: first what it did to cells, then why, then what it could be used for, and finally what could be sold.

Seattle, and the copper

By the end of the 1970s Pickart was working in Seattle, and it was from there that the finding came that gave the tripeptide its modern identity. In a 1980 paper in Nature, his group reported that during its isolation the peptide — then written GHL — came out of plasma together with roughly equal molar amounts of copper and a smaller amount of iron. It readily formed complexes with copper, and it increased the uptake of copper into cultured liver-tumour cells. The authors suggested the tripeptide might act as a copper transport factor, pointing to its resemblance to known copper-binding sites on larger plasma proteins 2.

That reframing did two things. Scientifically, it offered a mechanism: a growth-modulating factor whose effects might run through the delivery of an essential and dangerous metal. Practically, it created the compound that would carry his name into commerce — GHK-Cu, the copper complex, which is a deep, unmistakable blue. A colourless tripeptide is a line in a paper. A blue one looks like a product.

ProCyte and the drug that became a dressing

In the mid-1980s Pickart co-founded a company, ProCyte, to develop GHK-based products for wound healing and hair, and later took it public on NASDAQ 5. Its ambition was a medicine: a copper-peptide treatment that would be shown in trials to heal chronic wounds. Pickart did not see that ambition through himself. According to his family's account, a serious blood clot that required cardiac surgery and a long recovery led him to leave the company, and by 1994 he had started again elsewhere 5.

The trial that was meant to establish the drug arrived in October 1994 and failed. Its 511 patients did no better than the control group. The company's shares, which had traded as high as fifteen dollars earlier that year, fell below three; it cut more than a third of its workforce and received a hostile merger proposal 3.

Sixteen months later came the clearance that saved it, and the terms of that clearance are the hinge of this whole story. In February 1996 the US Food and Drug Administration allowed ProCyte to sell its copper-peptide product, Iamin gel, as a wound dressing for diabetic ulcers, pressure sores, venous ulcers, burns, surgical incisions and abrasions. It was cleared as a Class I medical device, a route requiring less rigorous testing than a drug, and the company was prohibited from claiming that Iamin healed wounds. It could be sold as a wound-care product. Its shares rose by more than half in a day 3.

From the clinic to the counter

What followed was a slide down the regulatory ladder, one rung at a time. ProCyte's later business was copper-peptide skincare and hair products. By the time PhotoMedex agreed to buy it, in an all-stock deal announced in December 2004 and valued at about twenty-four million dollars, ProCyte was based in Redmond, Washington, and its portfolio was built around brands such as Neova and a patented GHK copper-peptide technology 4.

None of that was improper, and it should not be read as a charge against anyone. It is simply how the system works. A medicine needs trials that show benefit. A low-risk device needs less. A cosmetic, sold for the appearance of skin rather than for any change to its structure or function, needs no pre-market proof of effect at all. When the first door closes, a compound with a plausible biology and a pleasant safety record will find the next one open. The research literature does not disappear when that happens; it becomes marketing copy, quoted in a register it was never written for.

Copper peptides are one of the clearest cases of that path in the peptide field, and they are not unusual. The jar on the counter frequently marks the last door a research finding could get through, not the first.

Skin Biology, and the second half of a career

Pickart's own second act ran in parallel. In 1994, with his health restored, he and his wife Charlene founded Skin Biology, a company built to continue the work on GHK and develop second-generation copper peptides 5. He kept writing about the molecule in the scientific literature. In 2008 he set out, as sole author, the case that GHK acts in tissue remodelling 6. A decade later, with a co-author, he re-read the compound in the light of gene-expression data, arguing that it shifts the activity of large numbers of human genes in directions associated with repair and protection 7.

By the end he had published forty-six articles in peer-reviewed journals and held twenty-nine patents 5. As the companion piece on this site points out, an unusually large share of the GHK literature carries his name, which is both a measure of his persistence and the main reason its conclusions still need testing by people with no stake in them.

What fifty years on one molecule looks like

Laid end to end, the career has a shape most scientific lives do not. A farm, an Army engineering posting, a thesis. A finding about copper in Seattle. A public company chasing a wound-healing drug, a failed trial, a device clearance on narrower terms. A family business and a stream of papers, continuing until a stroke ended it at eighty-five 5. The molecule never became the medicine he first set out to make. It became, instead, one of the best-known ingredients in cosmetic chemistry, and it remains, half a century on, a live subject of laboratory research.

That leaves the question the jars cannot answer, and it is a technical one. A blue copper complex applied to the surface of skin has to cross a barrier built precisely to keep things out, and whether it does, how far, and in what form is a matter of penetration measured layer by layer in the laboratory. That is where a technical article about GHK-Cu has to begin.