Peptide directoryGut, pancreas & liver

Desacyl-ghrelin

Ghrelin without its fatty acid: most of the ghrelin in blood, and no hunger signal.

Where it comes from

Made in
The stomach, and ghrelin losing its fatty acid in blood
Sent out by
With ghrelin; it makes up most of the circulating ghrelin
Acts on
  • Muscle
  • Fat tissue
  • Pancreatic beta cells

What it does

  • Causes no hunger and releases no growth hormone 1
  • Opposes some effects of acyl-ghrelin on glucose in animal studies
  • Its function is still debated, and no receptor has been found for it 1

In medicine

  • No medicine. Assays that measure it apart from acyl-ghrelin are needed in research, because the two are still too often reported together as “total ghrelin” 1
  • Its share of the total shifts with feeding and with illness, which is why a total-ghrelin number is hard to read 1

Beyond the body’s own use

  • Livoletide (AZP-531), a stabilised desacyl-ghrelin analogue, improved food-related behaviour against placebo in a 47-person randomised trial in Prader-Willi syndrome 2; the larger trial that followed did not confirm it and development stopped in 2020
  • It is studied for muscle wasting and for glucose handling in animals, where it opposes some of acyl-ghrelin’s effects; none of that has been shown in people
  • The ghrelin peptides people obtain outside approval are receptor agonists; this one is not, so it carries none of their effects

Sources

  1. Müller et al., Ghrelin, Molecular Metabolism 2015
  2. Allas et al., AZP-531, an unacylated ghrelin analogue, in Prader-Willi syndrome, PLoS One 2018

This card describes what a medicine is for and what the evidence says; it recommends nothing. Talk to your clinician about anything you read here.