Research library

Immune & Thymic

Thymosin Alpha-1

Approved medicineAcetylated 28 residue thymic peptide

Also published as Thymalfasin, Zadaxin, Ta1

A 28 amino acid peptide originally isolated from thymic tissue, now made synthetically. It is a licensed medicine in a number of countries and has the strongest regulatory standing of any immune peptide in this catalogue.

Where it came from

Isolated from thymosin fraction 5 by Allan Goldstein in the 1970s and commercialised as thymalfasin.

What the literature examines

  • Dendritic cell and T cell function, and Toll-like receptor signalling
  • Chronic hepatitis B and C, in registered clinical trials
  • Vaccine adjuvant response in immunosuppressed and elderly populations
  • Sepsis, in randomised trials including a large Chinese study
  • COVID-19, in trials conducted from 2020

State of the evidence

Furthest it has gotApproved medicine

Approved in roughly thirty countries for hepatitis indications and as an immune adjuvant. Not FDA approved in the United States.

What a buyer should know

It is approved in many places, and not in the US, and both facts belong in the same sentence when you describe it. The sepsis and COVID trial results are mixed rather than uniformly positive.

Handling and stability

Lyophilised, water soluble, cold chain.

Read it yourself

We do not publish a curated citation list, because a hand picked list of papers is a sales tool. These links run a live query against the public databases, so you see everything, including the results that do not suit us.

Supplied for laboratory research use only. Nothing on this page is a dose, a protocol or a claim of effect in humans, and nothing here is medical advice. Read our research use policy.