/ 08 / THE PUBLISHER
About GHK-Cu Source.
An independent editorial digest of the copper-tripeptide literature — what it is, what it is not, and how it handles citations.
What this site is
GHK-Cu Source is an independent editorial project that publishes summaries of the peer-reviewed research literature on GHK-Cu, the glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine copper(II) complex. We are not a clinic. We do not employ clinicians and we do not provide medical advice. We do not manufacture, sell, or distribute any product. Our work is editorial commentary on publicly available science.
The site reads the copper-tripeptide record the way a careful reviewer would: lead with what each study measured, attribute it to its source, and mark the places where the evidence is thin or where two forms of the molecule have been conflated. The name is the method. "Source" here means two things at once — GHK-Cu as the endogenous source-signal from which the dermal matrix and the repair program grow, and the audited primary literature as the source this digest draws from. Both are kept honest on the page.
Why "Source" is editorial framing, not a service claim
The word "source" in the domain is a position this publisher occupies relative to the literature — the origin of a finding and the place a reader can verify it — not a claim that the site supplies a product or a treatment. We do not source, stock, sell, prescribe, or dispense anything. There is no clinic behind the name and no counter behind the page.
That distinction matters because GHK-Cu sits across a regulatory line. Topical Copper Tripeptide-1 is a long-established legal cosmetic ingredient; injectable or systemic GHK-Cu is not approved as a drug by the FDA, EMA, or any other regulatory body, and no validated human pharmacokinetic data exist for systemic use. We describe research findings using "studied at X in [model]" framing throughout, never a human dosing recommendation. Where community protocols circulate without a peer-reviewed basis, we say so.
How we handle citations
Every quantitative claim on this site — every concentration, percentage, gene count, hair-count delta, and stability constant — resolves to a numbered entry on the GHK-Cu research references page, each carrying a DOI and a PubMed or PMC link. We distinguish primary studies from reviews, and we flag when a widely repeated figure (such as the "~4,000 genes" claim) is an extrapolation rather than a measured result [2].
We also note authorship concentration where it bears on confidence: a large share of the foundational GHK-Cu literature originates from a single investigator and colleagues, so we surface the independent corroborations — Campbell 2012 and the Ladiges-group work — explicitly [8][15]. The goal is a digest a skeptical reader can trust because the gaps are visible, not papered over.