A study gave a thymus‑derived peptide called thymalin together with standard antipsychotic drugs to 36 people whose schizophrenia didn’t respond to usual treatment and who also had immune system problems. The combo helped many patients feel better, become more active, and have fewer drug side‑effects, and these improvements matched a return toward normal immune markers.

The thymic peptide thymaline combined with psychotropic drugs was used in the treatment of 36 therapeutically resistant patients with pronounced immune abnormalities. Such a policy favoured considerable enhancement of the treatment efficacy which manifested itself by the elimination or amelioration of psychic disorders, appreciable activation of patients and reduction of neuroleptic complications. The positive dynamics in the patients' status always correlated with the normalization of immune abnormalities, with this being seen to a greater degree in cases of the secondary "pharmacogenic" resistance and resistance because of the "pathological ground". On the one hand, the studies demonstrated wide potentialities of the use of thymaline in the treatment of the resistant patterns of schizophrenia. On the other hand, they showed the heterogeneity of immune abnormalities in patients with different varieties of resistance.