Educational use only — not medical advice. This guide summarizes information reported in published research and community practice for educational purposes. It is not medical advice and not a recommendation to use any compound. Any doses, schedules, or combinations shown are examples of what has been reported, not instructions for you. Many peptides described here are research compounds that are not FDA-approved for the uses discussed and may be investigational or restricted. Effects, risks, and legal status vary; individual needs and results vary. Consult a qualified, licensed healthcare professional before making any decision. Do not use this content to diagnose, treat, or dose yourself.
Cartalax at a glance
- What it is
- A synthetic tripeptide, Ala-Glu-Asp (AED), from Vladimir Khavinson's short-peptide "bioregulator" family. PubChem lists it as CID 87815447, formula C12H19N3O8, molecular weight 333.29 g/mol, CAS 85806-95-7, with "Cartalax" and "T-31 peptide" among its synonyms. It is three residues, not four — see the sequence FAQ below.
- Researched for
- Cell-culture geroprotection. The published AED record covers renal cells, skin fibroblasts, bone-marrow mesenchymal stem cells, thymocytes and periodontal-ligament stem cells — not cartilage.
- Commonly reported range
- Roughly 1–2 mg/day subcutaneous or 10–20 mg/day oral in community write-ups. These figures trace to vendor and forum sources, not to any published study — no published work has administered AED to a living human or animal at a stated dose.
- Route reported
- Subcutaneous injection or oral, per community protocols. Every published AED experiment applied the peptide to cells or tissue explants in culture, so no route has been tested in a whole organism.
- Reported frequency
- Once daily during a course, per community sources.
- Reported cycle
- 10–20 consecutive days, repeated two to three times per year, per community sources.
- Plasma half-life
- Not established in any species. No pharmacokinetic study of AED has been published, so there is no measured half-life, clearance or bioavailability figure to report — a specific number seen elsewhere is not traceable to a study.
- Regulatory status
- Not FDA-approved for any use, and no clinical trial of Cartalax is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. Research/educational use only.
Reported ranges from research/community — examples, not recommendations.
What it is / mechanism
Cartalax belongs to the short synthetic peptides developed by Vladimir Khavinson's group at the St. Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology, a family that also includes Epithalon (AEDG), Vilon (KE) and Pinealon (EDR). The proposed mechanism, shared across the family, is that peptides this short cross into the cell and the nucleus and interact directly with DNA to modulate tissue-specific gene expression — a genuinely unusual claim, since most signalling peptides act at a surface receptor rather than on the genome itself. The specific proposal for AED comes from a 2014 paper in Advances in Gerontology (PMID 25946838), which reports that molecular models of AED and the related peptide EDL form their most energetically favourable complexes with d(ATATATATAT)₂ sequences in the DNA minor groove, and argues that this AT-rich binding is the cause of the gene-expression changes the same paper measured in ageing renal cell culture. It is important to read that for what it is: a computational docking model paired with a cell-culture observation, not a demonstration that AED reaches the nucleus of a cell in a living organism or that binding at that site drives the effect. No structural or binding study — no crystal structure, no measured dissociation constant for AED at DNA — appears in the indexed literature. The mechanism is a hypothesis with a model behind it, and it should be described that way.
Researched effects
The measured effects of AED are cell-culture effects, and they are reasonably consistent across four tissue types. In ageing renal cell culture (PMID 25946838, Advances in Gerontology, 2014), AED increased proliferation and decreased expression of the senescence markers p16, p21 and p53 while increasing SIRT-6. In organotypic kidney explants from young and old rats (PMID 26033601, Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, 2015), AED — there called T-31 — stimulated proliferation and reduced apoptosis, though the paper is explicit that it did so to a lesser degree than the whole calf-kidney polypeptide complex it was being compared against. In skin fibroblasts aged in vitro (PMID 27259496, 2016), AED was among the peptides that inhibited MMP-9 synthesis and raised Ki-67 and CD98hc, and AED specifically suppressed caspase-dependent apoptosis. In human embryonic bone-marrow mesenchymal stem cells (PMID 32399807, Molecular Biology Reports, 2020), the studied peptides raised IGF1 expression 3.5- to 5.6-fold. One further result belongs here precisely because it is negative: in an ageing thymocyte culture (PMID 22238759, 2011), T-31 was tested alongside two other peptides and only AB-9 produced the geroprotective effect — AED did not. Vendor summaries of this compound tend to carry the four positive results and omit the fifth.
Evidence & regulatory status
- Evidence: six indexed studies, all of them in vitro or in tissue explants, and all of them from the same research group. There is no animal efficacy study in which AED was given to a living animal, and no human study of any kind. One of the six is a published negative result for AED itself (thymocyte culture, PMID 22238759).
- The cartilage gap, stated plainly: Cartalax is marketed as a cartilage and joint bioregulator, and a PubMed search for Ala-Glu-Asp together with cartilage returns nothing, as does a search for this peptide family with chondrocyte. That is a real zero rather than a search artefact — the same database returns 111 records for Ala-Glu-Asp on its own and more than 13,000 for chondrocyte peptide. The published AED record is kidney, skin, thymus, marrow and periodontal ligament. Cartilage is the one tissue the name promises and the literature does not cover.
- Registry: no clinical trial of Cartalax or AED is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. Combined with the absence of animal dosing work, this means every dose figure circulating for this compound originates outside the scientific literature.
- Regulatory: not approved by the FDA or EMA for any use, not an established prescription drug, and handled as a research chemical. Material sold as Cartalax is for laboratory and research use only — not a dietary supplement or medicine, and not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
Dosage — reported ranges (overview)
The figures below are examples of what community and vendor sources report, and this page can be unusually precise about where they do not come from. No published study has administered AED to a human or to a living animal at any stated dose — every experiment in the indexed record applied the peptide to cells or tissue explants in a dish, where the relevant quantity is a concentration in the culture medium, not a milligram amount given to a body. Injectable community write-ups commonly cite roughly 1–2 mg per day subcutaneously, oral write-ups roughly 10–20 mg per day, typically in courses of 10–20 days repeated a few times a year. Those numbers are internally consistent across vendor pages, which is easy to mistake for corroboration; they are consistent because they are copied from one another. Some sources also mention microgram-level amounts, which is a different order of magnitude again. Treat the spread as what it is — an absence of data rather than a range of findings.
A printable protocol sheet with a reconstitution reference and an injection log comes with All-Access Lifetime.
Reconstitution — bac-water math
Reconstitution is concentration math only, not a personal dose. Lyophilized peptide is dissolved by adding bacteriostatic water, and the concentration is the total peptide divided by the water volume. On a U-100 insulin syringe, 100 units = 1 mL, so units = (desired mg ÷ mg-per-mL) × 100. Worked through for a representative 20 mg Cartalax vial reconstituted with 2 mL of bacteriostatic water: the concentration is 20 ÷ 2 = 10 mg/mL, so a 1 mg example amount is 1 ÷ 10 = 0.1 mL, which is 10 units on a U-100 syringe. Every row in the table below stays well under the 100-unit capacity of a single U-100 syringe, so no row requires a second draw.
| Bac water added | Concentration | 1 mg example | 2 mg example |
|---|
| 1 mL | 20 mg/mL | 5 units (0.05 mL) | 10 units (0.10 mL) |
| 2 mL | 10 mg/mL | 10 units (0.10 mL) | 20 units (0.20 mL) |
| 3 mL | 6.67 mg/mL | 15 units (0.15 mL) | 30 units (0.30 mL) |
This is concentration math, not a dose recommendation.
Injection / administration basics
Community protocols most often describe small-volume subcutaneous injection using a U-100 insulin syringe into subcutaneous tissue such as the abdomen, with standard aseptic handling — single-use needles, an alcohol swab, nothing shared. Oral use is also described in Khavinson-peptide contexts. Worth stating alongside that: the published research never administered this peptide by any route to a living organism, so there is no tested route to describe, only a reported one. None of this is medical guidance, and anyone considering use should consult a licensed clinician.
Half-life & frequency rationale
There is no published half-life for Cartalax, and that is the complete answer rather than a gap in this page. No pharmacokinetic study of AED has been published in any species — no clearance, no volume of distribution, no bioavailability, no measured plasma concentration at any time point. A figure of roughly 30 minutes circulates widely, and an earlier version of this page carried it; it could not be traced to any study and has been removed rather than repeated. What can be said is general rather than specific: unmodified short peptides with free N- and C-termini are substrates for the exopeptidases present in plasma, so a short circulating life is chemically reasonable to expect. That is an expectation from the class, not a measurement of this compound, and it should not be quoted as a number.
Side effects, safety & contraindications
There is no published human safety data for Cartalax, because there is no published human study of Cartalax. The Khavinson short-peptide family is generally described as well tolerated in the available literature and observational reports, and minor injection-site reactions are the most commonly mentioned complaint in community sources. Neither of those statements is a safety finding for this compound: an absence of reported harm from research that never dosed a person is not evidence of safety, and long-term safety is entirely unestablished. Consult a licensed professional; this is not a safety clearance.
Stacking — overview
Community sources describe combining Cartalax with other tissue-repair and bioregulator peptides in joint- and connective-tissue protocols. No study has examined AED in combination with anything, so these are examples of what people discuss rather than combinations with evidence behind them. The pairings below are listed because they are the ones asked about, not because they are supported.
Joint & Tissue Repair
Cartalax + BPC-157 + TB-500 — a community pairing; no study has tested AED alongside either compound.
Connective Matrix / Collagen
Cartalax + GHK-Cu — community-reported; GHK-Cu has its own separate literature, and none of it involves AED.
Bioregulator Longevity
Cartalax + Epithalon (AEDG) — both are Khavinson-family peptides and both appear in the same cell-culture papers, though the papers compare them rather than combine them.
Stacking across compounds
The overview above covers Cartalax. The cross-compound material — which pairings are redundant rather than additive, where interaction risk is documented versus merely unstudied, and the blend arithmetic worked end to end — lives in the Peptide Stacking Guide, which is free to read in outline and $39 in full (included with All-Access Lifetime).
Included with this guide
The Cartalax Stacking Module
The overview above is the free summary. The Cartalax Stacking Module goes through each combination in depth — the mechanism-level reason it is proposed, what is actually reported in practice, and the cautions specific to that pairing — plus what to avoid and why. Included with Cartalax Standard Access.
- How to think about stacking Cartalax — 5 principles
- 3 combinations covered in detail
- What to avoid, and why — 3 items
- Combination-specific cautions
Combinations covered: Joint & Tissue Repair, Connective Matrix / Collagen, Bioregulator Longevity.
For how combinations are grouped by research context, the named blends, and why a pre-mixed blend vial cannot be calculated from its total milligrams, see the peptide stacks guide.
Storage & handling
- Lyophilized (powder): store sealed and protected from light; refrigerated at 2–8 °C is common, and freezing supports longer-term storage.
- Reconstituted (in bacteriostatic water): keep refrigerated at 2–8 °C, protect from light, and use within a few weeks. Bacteriostatic water's benzyl alcohol is what makes repeated withdrawals from one vial reasonable; sterile water carries no preservative and is single-use.
References
Primary sources for this guide: NCBI's substance record for alanyl-glutamyl-aspartic acid (synonyms cartalax, T-31 peptide) for the sequence; PMID 25946838 (Advances in Gerontology, 2014) for the renal cell-culture results and the DNA minor-groove binding model; PMID 26033601 (Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, 2015) for the organotypic kidney explant comparison; PMID 27259496 (2016) for skin-fibroblast MMP-9 and apoptosis findings; PMID 32399807 (Molecular Biology Reports, 2020) for IGF1 expression in mesenchymal stem cells; PMID 30791821 (International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology, 2019) for periodontal-ligament stem-cell differentiation; and PMID 22238759 (2011) for the negative thymocyte result. Registry status checked against ClinicalTrials.gov. Where an earlier version of this page carried the AEDL sequence, a cartilage gene-expression claim or a 30-minute half-life, those statements have been withdrawn rather than corrected silently, because none could be traced to a source.
Related peptide guides
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Guide FAQ
Quick answers about guide scope, access, and educational use context.
What is Cartalax?
Cartalax is a synthetic short peptide from the Khavinson bioregulator family, developed at the St. Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology. Its sequence is Ala-Glu-Asp (AED) and it also appears in the literature under the research code T-31. It is a research compound, not an approved medicine, and its published record consists of six cell-culture studies.
Is Cartalax AEDL or AED — a tripeptide or a tetrapeptide?
It is AED, the tripeptide Ala-Glu-Asp. This page previously said Ala-Glu-Asp-Leu (AEDL), a tetrapeptide, which is the sequence Cartalax is most often sold under — and it is wrong. Two NCBI databases settle it independently. PubChem records Cartalax as CID 87815447 with the formula C12H19N3O8, a molecular weight of 333.29 g/mol and CAS number 85806-95-7, listing "Cartalax", "Ala-Glu-Asp", "H-Ala-Glu-Asp-OH" and "T-31 peptide" as synonyms of L-alanyl-L-glutamyl-L-aspartic acid — three residues. The MeSH substance record agrees, describing the same compound as a synthetic peptide with geroprotective activity. Every indexed study returned by a search for Cartalax examines AED. The distinction is easy to check on a certificate of analysis, and this is the practical reason to care: AED has a mass of 333.29, whereas a genuine AEDL tetrapeptide would calculate to roughly 446 — a difference of about 113 daltons, far larger than any measurement tolerance. A mass-spectrometry result on a report will match one sequence or the other, unambiguously.
Is there any research on Cartalax and cartilage?
No, and this is the single most useful thing to know about the compound. Cartalax is marketed for cartilage and joints, and a literature search for this peptide together with cartilage or with chondrocytes returns nothing at all. The result is a genuine zero rather than a failed search, because the same database returns 111 records for the sequence on its own and over 13,000 for peptide research in chondrocytes. The published AED work is in renal cells, skin fibroblasts, bone-marrow mesenchymal stem cells, thymocytes and periodontal-ligament stem cells. The claim that AED acts on type II collagen and aggrecan promoters appeared on an earlier version of this page and has been removed, because no study supporting it could be found.
Has Cartalax been tested in humans or in animals?
Not in humans, and not in living animals either. All six indexed studies applied the peptide to cells or tissue explants in culture. One of them used kidney explants taken from rats, which is the closest the record comes to an animal experiment, and even there the tissue was in a dish rather than in an animal. No clinical trial of Cartalax is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. That is why this guide gives no dosing recommendation: there is no dose in the literature to report.
What is Cartalax's half-life?
Unknown, in every species. No pharmacokinetic study of AED has been published — no half-life, clearance, volume of distribution or bioavailability figure exists. The roughly-30-minute figure that circulates online, which this page used to carry, could not be traced to any study and has been withdrawn. Short peptides with unprotected termini are generally expected to be cleared quickly by plasma exopeptidases, but that is a property of the class rather than a measurement of this compound.
Do any of the Cartalax studies report a negative result?
Yes, one, and it is worth knowing because vendor summaries omit it. A 2011 study of ageing thymocyte cultures (PMID 22238759) tested T-31 — the code for AED — alongside two other peptides, and reported that only AB-9 produced a geroprotective effect. AED was tested in that model and did not show one. Four of the six studies are positive, one is negative, and all six come from the same research group, which is the honest shape of the evidence base.
Why is all the Cartalax research from one group?
The Khavinson short peptides were developed at a single institute and the great majority of work on them has been published by that institute and its collaborators, largely in Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine and Advances in Gerontology. That is not by itself a reason to dismiss the findings, but independent replication is a large part of how a result becomes reliable, and for this compound it has not happened. When reading any claim about Cartalax, it is reasonable to ask whether anyone outside the originating group has reproduced it. So far, no.
How is Cartalax reconstituted?
Bacteriostatic water is added to the lyophilized powder, and the concentration is total mg divided by mL of water. A 20 mg vial with 2 mL of water gives 10 mg/mL, so a 1 mg example amount is 0.1 mL, or 10 units on a U-100 insulin syringe. This is concentration arithmetic, not a personal dose, and the reconstitution calculator on this site runs the same math for any vial and volume.
What dosages are reported for Cartalax?
Community and secondary sources report examples around 1–2 mg/day subcutaneously or 10–20 mg/day orally, in short courses of 10–20 days. Those figures are reported examples with no study behind them — no published research has given this peptide to a human or an animal at a stated dose. They are reproduced here because people search for them, not because they are validated.
Is Cartalax FDA-approved or prohibited in sport?
It is not FDA-approved for any use and is sold for research only. It is not listed by name on the WADA Prohibited List, but a substance not being named is not the same as a substance being permitted — non-approved compounds can fall under the catch-all category for substances with no current regulatory approval for human therapeutic use. Any athlete should verify current anti-doping rules directly rather than relying on a guide page for compliance.
Compliance and trust notes
- Educational content only; no personalized health or outcome claims.
- No personalized use recommendation outputs.
- Use this material for general learning and research-context literacy.
