Published on January 15, 2025 11:36 PM GMT
Empiric status: I studied bioinformatics, but I'm not working in the field. I researched the article over a few months.
After reading about peptides and BPC-157 potential effects on wound healing, I decided to research BPC-157 and write this article to summarize my findings. Even if you aren’t interested in BPC-157, it’s an interesting case of a drug without FDA approval that still gets used by a few doctors, which gives us an interesting perspective on what happens when drugs get used without FDA approval.
Peptides are an interesting category. I previously argued that Orexin is promising enough to warrant experimentation and research. While there are some patents filed on peptides post-2013, the decision by the US Supreme Court to rule gene patents void makes peptide drugs derived from human peptides harder to defend, which makes them unattractive for pharma companies to investigate.
In the absence of academic studies involving human trials, the knowledge we have about the effects of peptides comes either from extrapolating animal studies or from anecdotal human reports. There are online communities like r/peptides where users share information about their experiences and give each other advice about which peptides to take.
A blogger who goes by Troof created a huge questionnaire to get people to report their experiences with various nootropics including peptides. He writes:
Selank, Semax, Cerebrolysin, BPC-157 are all peptides, and they are all in the green “uncommon-but-great” rectangle above. Their mean ratings are excellent, but their probabilities of changing your life are especially impressive: between 5 and 20% for Cerebrolysin (which matches anecdotal reports), between 2 and 13% for BPC-157, and between 3 and 7% for Semax.
The concierge healthcare service, ultrapersonal healthcare, says about BPC-157:
BPC-157 is the darling child of biohacking, bodybuilding and performance-enhancing communities. Used for years overseas, in athletics, nootropic & regenerative spaces it’s now fast becoming a staple in many regenerative medicine, anti-aging medicine and functional medicine communities.
Examine.org describes its potential benefits as:
Studies conducted in rodents and cultured cells have suggested that BPC-157 may support the healing of various tissues, including tendons, joints, nerves, the intestinal tract, the stomach, and skin.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) decided in 2022 to declare BPC-157 a prohibited substance.
Does BPC-157 actually work?
If BPC-157 works as promised, it’s a disgrace that it or an analog doesn’t get used to speed up recovery after surgery and to heal other injuries. If it works and the FDA doesn’t allow it to be marketed for this purpose, it’s bad. However, if it doesn’t work and the FDA prevents it from being used more widely, it’s a sign that the FDA is useful.
But does it work? What can we do to figure out whether it works beyond looking at academic papers on animal experiments and human reports? Instead of treating the interaction as a Black box, we can develop a gears-model of how BPC-157 would increase wound healing.
If it increases wound healing, it would likely do so by binding to receptors. The knowledge about those receptors would be valuable to develop other drugs that target the receptors and thus there are strong incentives for academic study of those receptors.
The reports of ultrapersonal healthcare and Examine.org contain no information about academic studies about the receptors with which BPC-157 interacts to produce it’s wondrous effects.
Those reports do suggest that BPC-157 is a peptide that comes out of a protein they call BPC or body protective compound. To find out more about that protein I wanted to check it out in Uniprot is a free database that contains information about all known proteins. Uniprot doesn’t contain a protein that’s named “body protective compound”.
Maybe, Uniprot just knows this protein under another name? There’s a patent from 1989 titled Pharmacologically active substance BPC, the process for its preparation and its use in the therapy that says about BPC:
The structure of this substance is very complex and after our investigation until now can be characterized as folded protein with partial sequence from N-terminus:
H₂N-Gly-Glu-Pro-Pro-Pro-Gly-Lys-Pro-Ala-Asp-Asp-Ala-Gly-Leu-Val- .... -COOH
It has a molecular weight of about 40.000 ± 5.000 Daltons, determined by gel filtration.
While it wasn’t possible to search by sequence back in 1989, today genomes of many species are sequenced and searchable. When I search through the Uniprot database with BLAST this protein sequence doesn’t find any match. Searching over at NCBI only finds one hit out of a paper titled “Engineering recombinant Lactococcus lactis as a delivery vehicle for BPC-157 peptide with antioxidant activities” which provides no evidence that BPC exists as a natural protein.
When I wasn’t able to find the protein myself through BLAST searches I put up a question over at Biology.StackExchange about the origin of BPC-157.
Nobody, over at StackExchange could find the protein from which BCP-157 was derived either. On the other hand, Bryan Krause wrote an answer that points to other irregularities. The origin story of how the research that isolated BPC supposedly found out all its magical healing properties shortly after isolating it, isn’t credible. Research takes more time. If you want to know more about other irregularities, read the answer over there.
Most of the research comes from a single lab in Zagreb and is associated with the owner of above patent.
If the first research on BCP-157 is made up, it’s very unlikely that the later research on it is real either. The idea that a randomly made-up peptide has magic wound-healing properties is very implausible.
My best explanation of the anecdotal reports is that wound healing is a natural process and regression to the mean explains the observed healing.
The Information Environment
When I was starting my research in BCP-157, Examine.org was writing:
BPC-157 is a peptide consisting of 15 amino acids. It is derived from a protein found in the stomach. Ingestion or injection of BPC-157 is suspected of enhancing the repair of damaged tissues, although there is currently no human evidence to support this.
After I got my doubts and the above StackExchange answer was published, I sent Examine.org an email asking them to update their post on BPC-157. The paragraph now reads:
Body Protection Compound 157 (BPC-157) is a peptide composed of 15 amino acids. Although the researchers who patented BPC-157 say that it was derived from a stomach protein, this claim isn’t well-substantiated. BPC-157 is thought to improve the repair of damaged tissues, although there is currently no human evidence to support this hypothesis.
The Examine.org article didn’t update in the direction of the animal research being fraudulent. This suggests that Examine.org isn’t generally equipped to distinguish snake-oil supplements from useful supplements.
I frequently hear calls for FDA deregulation and generally feel sympathetic to them. However, if venues like examine.org aren’t able to conclude that a made-up peptide is unlikely to work, maybe FDA approval is an important element that we need to prevent our system from being overrun by sham drugs like BCP-157.
Conclusion
The lack of credible scientific evidence supporting BPC-157's effectiveness, combined with the dubious origins of its research and the financial incentives driving its promotion, casts significant doubt on its claimed benefits. Given that BPC-157 gets positive reviews from many that use it, it should make us skeptical of personal reviews of treatments and services like Examine.org.
Discuss
