Vilon

What it is

Vilon is the smallest peptide on this site, just lysine and glutamic acid joined together, and it is the thymus-and-immune member of the Khavinson bioregulator family. People run it in 10 to 20 day courses a few times a year hoping to prop up an aging immune system. The usual dose is 250 mcg to 1 mg a day, and the evidence is decades-old Russian cell, animal and small elderly-patient work that nobody outside that network has repeated.

Vilon's audience is the longevity rotation crowd: people in their 50s and beyond cycling Epitalon for the pineal and sleep, Pinealon for the brain, and Vilon for the thymus, the gland behind the breastbone that trains immune cells and shrinks with age. A smaller group is people who catch every cold going around and have read the Russian claims about immune 'normalization'. Almost nobody runs Vilon alone or as their first peptide.

What you will notice: nothing, most likely. There is no feeling that goes with a dipeptide at a few hundred mcg, and the claimed effect, immune markers moving toward a younger pattern, is invisible without a lab panel. People who say they got fewer colds the winter they ran it are reporting a season, not a result. The animal data on tumor rates and lifespan is the thing most likely to be misread; it is a reason the institute kept studying it, not a reason for you to run it as cancer prevention.

Dosing is simple once the scale is right. Courses run 250 mcg, 500 mcg or 1 mg subQ once a day for 10 to 20 days (up to 30), then several months off before the next course, and 500 mcg is the usual middle. The gap is not because it wears off: the effect is meant to carry on for months after a course, so running it straight through gains nothing, and the exact spacing is up to you. You will see 5 or 10 mcg quoted; that is a unit slip, a fraction of one syringe line that nobody can draw, and the rest of the bioregulator family is dosed in the hundreds of mcg or more. Mix a 10 mg vial with 1 ml of bacteriostatic water and it is 10 mg/ml, so 250 mcg is 2.5 units, 500 mcg is 5 units and 1 mg is 10 units. A 20-day course at 500 mcg uses one vial; at 1 mg it takes two.

Evidence sits at animal 2, human 1. The paper trail is real but old, small and Russian-language, almost entirely from the St. Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology: thymus cell cultures, rodent immune and lifespan models, and small studies in elderly people reporting shifts in lymphocyte and cytokine markers. Nothing has been replicated to modern standards elsewhere, so the honest read is 'plausible, cheap to test on yourself, impossible to verify without labs'.

Not worth it if you want an immune peptide with actual human data: Thymosin Alpha-1 is approved in several countries for hepatitis and as an immune adjuvant, and it is on this site. Not worth it if you have an autoimmune disease, a transplant or a cancer history, where 'modulating' immunity is the opposite of a casual experiment. If you just want the Khavinson rotation, Epitalon has more human footing than Vilon and is where to start.

What people use it for

Safety, in brief

The full picture — stop signs and who should talk to a doctor first — is on the dosing guide.

Sources

The labels and studies behind this page. Each link opens the original on PubMed, DailyMed or ClinicalTrials.gov.

1. Effect of peptide Lys-Glu on interleukin-2 gene expression in lymphocytesKhavinson et al., Bull Exp Biol Med 2000 · Study
2. Effect of vilon on the immunity status and coagulation hemostasis in patients of different age with diabetes mellitusKuznik et al., Adv Gerontol 2007 · Trial
3. A synthetic dipeptide vilon (L-Lys-L-Glu) inhibits growth of spontaneous tumors and increases life span of miceKhavinson et al., Dokl Biol Sci 2000 · Study
4. Effects of short peptides on lymphocyte chromatin in senile subjectsKhavinson et al., Bull Exp Biol Med 2004 · Study