Research guides
KPV (alpha-MSH 11-13): what the research says
The three-residue tail of α-MSH keeps the anti-inflammatory activity and drops the pigmentation. What the murine colitis work reported, and how thin it is.
Available in the catalogue
Supplied as research material. Sizes and pricing are on the product page. Availability is not a statement about what a compound does.
KPV is a useful illustration of how fragment research works: take a hormone with several activities, cut it down, and find out which activities survive. In this case the answer is unusually clean.
What the molecule is
A tripeptide — lysine, proline, valine — corresponding to the last three amino acids of α-melanocyte-stimulating hormone. It is the shortest fragment that retains the parent hormone's anti-inflammatory activity.
What survives the truncation
The anti-inflammatory action of α-MSH persists in this three-residue tail. The pigmentation activity does not. That separation is precisely what makes the fragment useful as a research tool: it isolates one arm of the parent hormone's pharmacology from the other, which is the same design logic behind ARA-290 and behind AOD-9604 elsewhere in this catalogue.
Published work in murine models of inflammatory bowel disease reports reduced inflammatory signalling, with uptake through the PepT1 transporter in intestinal cells. PepT1 matters mechanistically: it is a peptide transporter expressed in intestinal epithelium, and it gives a plausible route by which a tripeptide reaches the cells in question.
How much literature there actually is
Not much. The murine colitis work is the anchor citation and it is a single 2008 paper. For a molecule this small and this old, the sparseness of follow-up is itself informative — the fragment is well characterised in one model and largely unexamined outside it.
What studies reported
Each entry states what a study examined and the model it used. Nothing below describes an outcome for a person.
Everything below is drawn from published research, and each entry names the model the study used. Approval status varies by compound and by country, and nothing described here is supplied as a medicine or for use in a person.
- Kannengiesser et al. (2008)Inflammatory Bowel Diseases · 14(3):324–31
Reported anti-inflammatory activity of the melanocortin-derived tripeptide across mouse colitis models, with uptake described through the PepT1 transporter.
murine models of inflammatory bowel disease Source
Adverse and null findings reported
No dedicated safety study has been published for this compound. That is not a finding that none exists — it means the question has not been asked in print, and the gaps below say so.
What the research does not establish
An absence cannot be cited, so these are stated plainly. They are the part of the picture that silence would otherwise hide.
- The `adverse` list is empty because no toxicology study of this tripeptide has been published, not because it has been studied and found harmless.
- No randomised controlled trial in humans has been published for any indication, and the compound holds no marketing authorisation anywhere.
- The evidence base is essentially one model — murine colitis — examined in a small number of papers. Anything said about this fragment outside inflammatory bowel models is extrapolation from that single context.
- The PepT1 uptake route is described in intestinal cells. Whether it is relevant to any other tissue has not been established.
- Because it is a tripeptide, questions about stability and about how much survives to reach a target are more pressing than for larger molecules, and the published work does not answer them.
- The parent hormone α-MSH has a substantial literature of its own, but findings about the full hormone are not findings about this fragment — the whole point of the fragment is that it does not do everything the parent does.
Common questions
- What does KPV do according to research?
- Published murine work reports anti-inflammatory activity in models of inflammatory bowel disease, with uptake through the PepT1 transporter in intestinal cells. Those are findings in mice.
- Why is KPV described as α-MSH without the tanning?
- Because that is what the truncation achieves. The three-residue tail retains the parent hormone's anti-inflammatory activity and loses its pigmentation activity, which is what makes it useful for isolating one from the other.
- Has KPV been tested in humans?
- No randomised controlled trial has been published for any indication. The evidence base is murine.
- What is PepT1 and why does it matter?
- A peptide transporter expressed in intestinal epithelium. It gives a plausible mechanism by which a tripeptide reaches intestinal cells, which is why it appears in the colitis work.
- Is KPV an approved medicine?
- No, in any jurisdiction. It is supplied here as a laboratory reagent for in-vitro research and not for human or veterinary use.
Compounds covered
The reference page for each compound this article discusses.
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