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.
This article pretty much convinced me that cerebrosylin doesn't work (as a nootropic), which made me quite sceptical of all popular peptides, since it's also the highest-rated one in troof's survey.
Having with Cerebrolysin and BPC-157 the two top-rated peptides to be bogus, does suggest that the whole field is untrustworthy. It also makes me more skeptical about self-reporting.
Correction: it's examine.com not .org
Peptides that are often mentioned in the online "peptide community" (TB-4/TB-500, GHK-Cu, Tesamorelin, Ipamorelin, Tirzepatide, etc.) all have stronger evidence and "origin stories" than BPC-157. Until your post, I didn't realize that BPC's background was so shaky. Ironically, BPC is one of the most popular peptides in such communities, as far as I can tell.
Thinking through it I've come up with some possibilities for what might be going on
1. Complete Fabrication
Predrag deliberately fabricated everything, with the amino sequence being entirely random and having no real therapeutic effect. His 30 years of research are fraudulent, with collaborators having varying levels of awareness/involvement.
Unresolved Questions:
How do we explain the independent researchers in Taiwan/China/Korea? Are they complicit or just publishing invalid results?
What's the motivation behind such an elaborate and long-running scam?
Why establish a company and pursue patents if it's entirely fraudulent?
How has no one in the fitness/biohacking community noticed it's completely bunk?
2. Partial Truth with Obscured Origins
The origin story may be fabricated or obscured, but the peptide itself has genuine therapeutic benefits. His animal studies, while sometimes flawed in design, are fundamentally honest. Foreign research corroborates effectiveness.
Unresolved Questions:
What is the true source of the sequence?
Is there any real connection to gastric juices?
Why doesn't it match known proteins?
How plausible is the existence of an undiscovered stomach protein?
3. Sincere but Incompetent
Predrag genuinely believes in his work but is mistaken. The peptide is random and ineffective, with positive results stemming from poor methodology. Foreign researchers' results similarly flawed.
Unresolved Questions:
How could consistently positive results with large effect sizes persist for 30 years if the peptide is truly ineffective?
How did multiple independent researchers reach similar conclusions through flawed methods?
How has no one in the fitness/biohacking community noticed it's completely bunk?
4. Alternative Explanations
Other possibilities or complex combinations of the above scenarios not yet considered.
I'm at 10%, 25%, 50%, 15%. What about you @ChristianKl?
How could consistently positive results with large effect sizes persist for 30 years if the peptide is truly ineffective?
A majority of research studies in homeopathy find clinical effects. If you however limited yourself to high quality research papers, homeopathy seems to provide no clinical benefits. There are plenty of anecdotal reports of people getting large effect sizes from homeopathy.
It's the key argument for evidence-based medicine. Various placebo effects frequently make people believe that they have effective treatments when the treatment itself does nothing. While I argued that you could switch to prediction-based medicine and have an alternative to evidence-based medicine, medicine by anecdotes might just be a bad paradigm.
How do we explain the independent researchers in Taiwan/China/Korea? Are they complicit or just publishing invalid results?
Any honest researcher, that publishes research showing that BCP-157 is great, should be interested in what the protein actually does in the normal metabolism. Not doing the literature review to find out that BCP-157 does not seem to come from an exciting protein suggests complicity.
Publishing negative results is generally hard and there's little checks to scientific fraud in the far east.
Why establish a company and pursue patents if it's entirely fraudulent?
As long as people are willing to buy a treatment the company makes money even if the patients don't get results. BCP-157 is popular.
How plausible is the existence of an undiscovered stomach protein?
We sequenced the genome of most mammalian species, so there are no unknown mammalian proteins. To have an unknown undiscovered stomach protein, it would need to be produced by a bacteria that lives in the stomach that nobody has identified and sequenced. That seems implausible in 2025 given that we have shotgun sequencing to identify all bacteria in a given area. Remember that the bacteria would need to produce enough of the protein for the protein to be harvested the way Predrag claimed.
How has no one in the fitness/biohacking community noticed it's completely bunk?
That does suggest that there's a problem with those communities and people in general not doing deep research. Even when I emailed the people at Examine.com, that wasn't enough to get them to update their article to show that BCP-157 is likely complete bunk. The communities seem to be trend-driven. Influences make a lot of money with affiliate deals.
I'm at 10%, 25%, 50%, 15%. What about you @ChristianKl?
When you inject a random peptide, you get an inflammation response in the area where you injected it. There might be cases where that produces a useful therapeutic effect.
Apart from that I would give complete fabrication maybe 95%.
I focused my post on the argument that the BCP-157 doesn't come from a know protein, but that isn't the only argument to be made.
If Big Pharma companies would believe that BCP-157 is real, they would likely want to produce drugs that target the mechanisms through which BCP-157 produces it's effects.
Bryan Krause answer to my Stackexchange post analysis the implausibility of the early BCP-157 research in more detail.
It's been a while since I looked into the animal research, but from what I remember given the size of BCP-157, it shouldn't be absorbed from the intestines into the blood, but the animal research suggests it has some effects when ingested orally, that would not just require it to have an effect but also be absorbed from the intestines into the blood. That's another sign that the animal studies are crap.
Ultrapersonal Healthcare appears to have forgotten to pay Squarespace to renew their website, which doesn't seem like a great sign.
Anecdotal data point: an (online) friend of mine with EDS successfully used BPC-157 to treat shoulder ligament injury, although apparently it promoted scar tissue formation as well. He claims that it produced a significant improvement in his symptoms.
That's not a good data point. If you want to provide anecdotal data, it would be good to provide more of the observations. How long did he have a shoulder issue before taking BPC-157? How fast did it get away afterward?
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.com 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.
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.com 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.
Drugs that have a clinical effects on humans usually do so by effecting a biological pathway in humans. If BCP-157 would help with wound healing, finding out the biological pathway through with it's having an effect would be a high priority for serious researchers. There are no claims that BCP-157 binds any existing protein. None of the papers on BCP-157 propose any biochemical mechanism by which BCP-157 interacts with biological pathways.
My best explanation of the anecdotal reports is that wound healing is a natural process and regression to the mean explains the observed healing.
When I was starting my research in BCP-157, Examine.com 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.com 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.com article didn’t update in the direction of the animal research being fraudulent. This suggests that Examine.com 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.com 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.
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.com.