What this page is
Five compounds carry almost the whole "peptides for healing" market: BPC-157, TB-500, GHK-Cu, pentadeca arginate and thymosin beta-4.
Rather than restate the claims made for them, this page does one thing: it counts their entire registered clinical record and reports what is in it. Every figure below was read from ClinicalTrials.gov on 2026-09-20 by opening the records, not by counting search hits.
The result is short enough to put in one table.
The whole registered record
| Compound | Registered studies | What the studies actually are |
|---|---|---|
| Thymosin beta-4 | 18 | 7 eye, 3 skin ulcer, 6 cardiac, 2 healthy-volunteer safety |
| BPC-157 | 4 | 1 rotator-cuff phase 1 not yet recruiting · 1 healthy-volunteer study from 2015, status unknown · 1 hamstring phase 2 · 1 completed study of a peptide gummy supplement |
| GHK-Cu | 3 | only 1 administers GHK-Cu, on punch-biopsy wounds · 1 facial device study · 1 measures GHK in blood after a patch |
| TB-500 | 1 | a record whose own summary calls it fictional |
| Pentadeca arginate | 0 | — |
Twenty-six records between them, and the honest count of studies that give one of these compounds to a person for a healing question is lower still.
Thymosin beta-4 has the evidence, and it is in the eye
The compound with a real human record is the one nobody markets for healing.
Thymosin beta-4's eighteen registrations include three phase 3 trials, and all three are eye drops: ARISE-2 (601 participants) and ARISE-3 (700 participants) in dry eye syndrome, and a 70-person study in neurotrophic keratopathy, all sponsored by ReGenTree. Four further eye studies sit behind them.
Its wound record is real but small and old: RegeneRx ran a 72-person phase 2 in venous stasis ulcers, a 72-person phase 2 in pressure ulcers, and a 30-person study in epidermolysis bullosa that terminated. None was followed by a phase 3 in that indication.
Its cardiac record is the newest and is mostly Chinese: Beijing Northland Biotech has run phase 1 studies in healthy volunteers and phase 2 studies in acute myocardial infarction, with a 189-person phase 2 not yet recruiting.
What the eighteen do not contain is a tendon, a ligament, or a torn muscle.
TB-500 is a fragment, and its one registration says what it is
This is the point on which the marketing and the evidence separate completely.
Thymosin beta-4 is the 43-residue protein with eighteen trials. TB-500 is a short piece of it — residues 17 to 23 — and it is what is actually sold. The trials belong to the protein. The product is the fragment.
TB-500 has one registered study of its own, NCT07487363, a phase 1/2 in stable atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Its brief summary opens:
"This fictional study is an example of a ClinicalTrials.gov-style record."
That is the registry's own text, read on 2026-09-20. It is not a hidden disclosure; it is the first sentence.
One sponsor, one hospital, and two records that say they are examples
The finding that ties this page together came from applying a rule this library adopted in September 2026: before citing a registration as evidence, look at what else the sponsor has filed.
Hudson Biotech holds eight registrations. All eight are listed at a single location — Peking University Shenzhen Hospital — and all eight are recruiting. They cover GHK-Cu, BPC-157, TB-500, melanotan II, MOTS-c, tesamorelin, retatrutide and tirzepatide: an unusually exact overlap with the compounds sold on research-peptide websites.
Two of the eight describe themselves in their own brief summaries as examples. The TB-500 record calls itself fictional, quoted above. The melanotan II record opens "This example interventional study record describes...".
Three of those eight are the registrations that appear in the table above for BPC-157, TB-500 and GHK-Cu. Each is worth exactly what a reader decides it is worth after reading the set it belongs to — which is the point of the rule, and why a single record should never be cited without it.
What is left when the counting is done
Taken together:
- No completed trial of any of these five compounds in a tendon, ligament or muscle tear.
- Two registrations aimed at musculoskeletal injury, neither with results: a phase 1 in rotator cuff repair at the University of Arkansas, not yet recruiting, and a hamstring phase 2 from the sponsor described above.
- The one compound with substantial completed trials — thymosin beta-4 — is studied as an eye drop and sold as something else, under a different name, as a fragment of itself.
- Pentadeca arginate, marketed as BPC-157's successor, has nothing registered at all.
None of that establishes that these compounds do nothing. It establishes what is and is not known, which is a different claim and the only one the record supports. The animal literature for several of them, particularly BPC-157, is genuinely large; it is just not the kind of evidence a healing claim in a person is usually taken to rest on.
Where each compound's own entry goes further
- BPC-157 — the animal literature, in detail, and what it does and does not cover
- TB-500 — the fragment, and how it came to carry the protein's reputation
- Thymosin beta-4 — the full protein and its eighteen trials
- GHK-Cu — the copper complex, and what crossing skin actually requires
- Pentadeca arginate — the successor claim, read against its literature
- KPV — three amino acids from a hormone you already have, usually filed under inflammation rather than repair
For the same compounds arranged by the part of the body people are asking about, see the joints and tendons index, which lists what each one is studied for; this page is the evidence census that sits underneath it. The wolverine stack is the blend that combines two of them, and MuscleLedger's performance framing of that stack counts the same evidence for a training audience.
For everything this library covers by purpose, see the full index.
Last checked
2026-09-20. All registry figures were read through the ClinicalTrials.gov v2 API on that date, with each record opened individually to establish what it administers, and the Hudson Biotech sponsor set pulled in full.