Dihexa Deep Dive | Dosing, Safety, and Why I Keep Coming Back to It

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Hunter Williams (1:09)

Hey, everybody, this is Hunter Williams. I hope you're doing amazing wherever you might be in the world. Today, I am going to do a deep dive video on Dihexa. Dihexa is a neutropic peptide. It is very cool. I would actually say, you know, you guys don't know if you listen to me, I'm not the biggest neutropic head, but I do like to dabble from time to time. And I will say, of all the ones I've tried, I actually never have tried modafinil, and maybe that makes me a very weak and inexperienced biohacker, but that's okay. For me, nutribics are not something that I really like to push the gas pedal to. For a couple of reasons, one, I don't feel like I need to. And so, when you do what I do, you're hormonally optimized, you take peptides. The most part, I say I have all the brain function that I really desire, which I'm very blessed and fortunate to have that. But with some of these neutropic compounds, even ones that I've taken that are not really like as far, I've never taken modafinil, I've never taken Adderall, that don't push you that hard, for me, I don't necessarily always like the feeling. I kind of like to exist in this realm of able to have a lot of critical thought, but then also kind of existing as a normal person, if that makes sense. Meaning that I don't want to take something that is a neutropic that really stimulates my brain to the point of, one, where I become like a robot, or two, where I don't have as much social empathy, which I'm not saying every neutropic does that, because some are kind of the opposite. But when it comes to neutropics, I love how I work and what I get to do to work. And there's a time and place where you can work really, really hard, and maybe you need to push it for 12 or 16 hour days. But fortunately for me, I kind of like to exist in the form of life is a marathon, not a sprint. And I like doing my work. I'm very good at doing consistent work day in and day out. I'm not one of those people that will just like pull all-nighters for no reason. I like to do consistent work over time that compounds. If you watch my channel, you can probably tell, you know, I've been making videos now going on over six years, and it definitely has not been a meteoric rise in the least. It's been one of those things that are slow and steady. And so not to get off topic, but that is kind of my view around neutropics. However, that being said, I would say Dihexa for me is kind of the perfect middle ground. It's not so strong that I feel like I'd lose my personality, or I'd lose who I really am, because some neutropics I think can do that. But it's also not so weak, I don't really feel anything from it. And I will say, although I love C-Max, I love C-Lank, to me, those are more of kind of like, you can't really tell in every case if they're working or not. Some cases they do, but sometimes it's just like, I don't know how much I got out of that. Now, that being said, I think they're still very beneficial. And there's things that are probably going on that we don't see with C-Max and C-Lank. Whereas Dihexa, every time I take it, I get a good effect. But at the dose that I take it out, it doesn't push me too far. And so for me, Dihexa is a really good one. And I kind of looked back and I was like, have I done a deep dive on it? Not anyone's, anyone that I could have found recently. I know I've talked about it a lot in other videos. But anyway, that's what we're going to cover today. Just kind of go over the background of it. There's a little bit of an interesting story with Dihexa that we'll cover. But I love Dihexa. I think it's one that everyone can relatively benefit from, especially as diverse as many people's neurochemistry are. So strap up. That's what we're going to talk about today. Before I go into it, as always, make sure you're signed up for the email list. I have had my Spotify account terminated. Luckily, I was able to get it back. But just know that some of these things, I kind of have to go in the view now that they're temporary, meaning that as much as I can publish and do really well on one platform, which Spotify has been going well since my YouTube got deleted, it probably is all temporary. And I hate to say that, you know, knock on wood. But it's one of those things. I just don't know. I could wake up one day and all of my content could be gone, at least from the public side of the internet. So that's why the email list is so important, because I can stay in touch with you and send out if I do have to go to new places. And I do my best job not to spam you guys. I just send out information, either that I'm working on from a content perspective or just other things that I come across in my reading that I like to share with my audience. Make sure you're signed up for that. And also to check out the Action Collective, that's my private group. If you want direct access to be able to ask me questions and know that they're going to get answered. Also to the best part of that is there are over 200 other members in there. And we have a really good time. We do live calls on Thursday nights. And I think you'd enjoy it if you like this stuff. But anyway, without further ado, I'm gonna share my screen. And today we're gonna go into Dihexa. All right, today's gonna be a deep dive on Dihexa. Say that 10 times fast. Let's get into it and start with what is Dihexa. Basically, it's a synthetic peptide developed over two decades, actually at Washington State University. It was derived from angiotensin force and it stunned neuroscience by inducing new synapses for nation at picomolar concentrations, which were seven orders of magnitude more potent than BDNF in lab assays. Now, I will caveat and say that that was in vitro, not in real person-o. So, when we talk about these things, if it's happening in those things, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to have that same effect that BDNF would, like seven times the strength of BDNF to a human. But rather than tweaking neurotransmitter levels, Dihexa aims to physically rebuild synaptic architecture, which is what makes it so powerful. And we're going to see kind of what's going on inside the brain today and how that works. So, it was discovered in 1998 In 1992, they were able to analyze how it worked at the receptor level. 2001, they identified how to actually get it into a usable form. And then 2007, 2011, it was engineered for human use or the ability to be used as a compound. Now, here's a little bit of the scandal. So in 2013, the Washington State team co-founded M3 Biotechnology, later rebranded as Athera Pharma. And the company went public in 2020, raising over $200 million, not a chump change. And they developed this product called Fosgonimantan or ATH 1017, which was a pro-drug of Dihexa for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's trials. So what it was is a pro-drug of Dihexa. So you take this, and then the body would naturally increase Dihexa levels. And in 2021, CEO Lene Kowas was found to have manipulated images in her doctoral dissertation, at least in at least four co-authored papers. So Washington State revoked her PhD, and multiple papers were retracted or flagged. You can actually see this when I get to the reference slide. If you look up some of those references, you can see in PubMed that it was actually retracted. And so Athera paid $14 million in settlements for securities fraud and for False Claim Act violation. Now, all that to say does not change that Dihexa actually works, but I did think that was interesting to include because when we look at this research, a lot of this is going to be around this, particularly in humans. And you have to understand, no company is going to invest a ton in getting Dihexa become an approved drug, because it's really just a peptide. And so when we look at it, the risk to reward of spending a ton of money on taking this to market it to when you're not going to be able to really patent it in a way. And so that's why they made a pro drug, because it would be something they could patent that they were hoping would have the same effect. But anyway, the best thing to do is to not fake data and fake papers when you're doing that. But let's look at how Dihexa rewires the brains. You see this, if you're watching the video, you see this diagram I have here. So it binds HGF, which then facilitates dimerization. And then in the process of doing that, it activates C-MET tyrosine kinase. And then that creates this PI3K AKT pathway signaling, which then leads to a cascade via MAPK and ERK. And ultimately, that leads us to synaptogenesis at picomolar concentrations. Lots of scientific data to say, when we take Dihexa, it's going to bind HGF, and then that ends up leading to synaptogenesis. And then again, the 10 million times more potent than BDF claim refers strictly to the molar concentrations. Efficiency in vitro, not clinical superiority. But that's kind of the cycle of how Dihexa works in the brain to actually give us therapeutic benefits. So we look at the pharmacokinetics, it has around 38% oral bioavailability. It does cross the blood-brain barrier via passive transcellular diffusion enabled by engineered life illicity. The half-life, and this is where it's interesting with Dihexa, the half-life is around 13 days, 12.7 days. And so it's extraordinarily long circulating half-life after IV administration in rats, which reflects metabolic stability and sustained synaptic effects. Now what that means is that, one, there's going to be like a cumulative effect if you're taking it every day, and also it's going to take a while to get out of the body. Now that doesn't necessarily make it bad, it's just something to be conscious of, so maybe you don't need to take it every day. Like I have found that if you take Dihexa two or three times a week, you pretty much get really good benefit.