Dihexa

Dihexa came out of Joseph Harding and John Wright’s lab at Washington State University as a deliberate piece of medicinal chemistry. They had spent years on the angiotensin IV story, working with the parent hexapeptide Val-Tyr-Ile-His-Pro-Phe and watching it light up the AT4 receptor system in hippocampal tissue. The catch was the usual one with small peptides. Ang IV barely survives a pass through plasma, let alone a trip to the brain. The team’s answer was to rebuild it as a fatty, capped two-residue molecule with a six-carbon aminohexanoic spacer, keep the Tyr-Ile head, and accept that the result would no longer look much like a peptide at all. That molecule is Dihexa, formally N-hexanoyl-Tyr-Ile-(6)-aminohexanoic amide, and it is one of the few research compounds in this catalogue that the original group reported as orally available in rodents.

Where the HGF/c-Met angle comes from

Most research peptides on the shelf act through GPCRs, growth-hormone secretagogue pathways, or somatostatin-style circuits. Dihexa sits somewhere else. The Wright-Harding work, picked up later by Benoist and Kawas, points at hepatocyte growth factor and its receptor c-Met as the relevant signalling axis in the central nervous system. The proposed reading is that Dihexa augments HGF binding at c-Met rather than acting at the receptor directly, with downstream effects on dendritic arborisation and synaptogenesis in hippocampal cultures. That is a mechanism story you do not see elsewhere in the catalogue, which is part of why comparative neuroscience groups ask for it specifically.

What the literature focuses on

The published work clusters in three places. The first is the original synaptogenesis line, where dissociated hippocampal neurons show measurable increases in spine density after exposure. The second is rodent cognition, with scopolamine and aged-rat models used to look at task performance after oral or intracerebroventricular administration. The third is the structure-activity tail, where the Pullman group and others have asked which parts of the N-hexanoyl cap and the aminohexanoic spacer are doing the lifting, and whether further analogues can keep the HGF augmentation while losing the lipophilicity. Anyone running comparative work on c-Met modulators or BDNF-adjacent pathways usually wants Dihexa as a reference point.

What ships in the vial

• Sealed glass vial of lyophilised Dihexa, flushed with inert gas before sealing
• Batch-specific Certificate of Analysis with the HPLC chromatogram and mass-spec trace for that lot
• Lot number printed on the vial label, matching the CoA

Purity on our lots runs at 98 percent or better by reverse-phase HPLC, with mass spec confirming the expected mass for the N-hexanoyl-Tyr-Ile-(6)-aminohexanoic amide structure. If a vial does not match its CoA on arrival, we refund it. The policy is real and the inbox that handles it is read by a person, not a ticket bot.

Sourcing and dispatch

Every batch we list comes from a UK or EU contract peptide manufacturer we have audited. Dihexa is one of the compounds where sourcing matters more than usual: the molecule is heavily lipophilic and the synthesis route leaves room for residual coupling reagents if a supplier cuts corners. We do not list lots from unverified Asian sources for that reason. UK orders placed before late afternoon Monday to Thursday are dispatched the same working day, and around nine out of ten arrive within 48 hours.

Storage and bulk

Lyophilised Dihexa is stable at room temperature for short transit windows but should be moved to a freezer at minus 20 C on arrival for long-term storage. Because of the lipophilic backbone, most labs reconstitute in DMSO or ethanol rather than bacteriostatic water and dilute into assay buffer at the bench. If you need ten or more vials for a multi-arm protocol or a longer time-course study, message support for a custom quote rather than running through the cart. Live chat is staffed by humans during UK working hours, and reconstitution or CoA questions get an answer from someone who handles the stock.

Sold strictly for in vitro laboratory research. Not for human or veterinary use. UK 18+.