How BPC-157 Was Discovered

The history of BPC-157 is closely tied to one laboratory. Almost everything known about it started in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Zagreb School of Medicine, where Professor Predrag Sikirić and his colleagues have done most of the work.

A Protective Protein in Gastric Juice

Scientists had long wondered why the stomach does not digest itself. In a 1993 paper in the Journal of Physiology (Paris), the Zagreb group described a protein of about 40,000 daltons in human gastric juice that appeared to protect the stomach lining. They called it BPC, for Body Protection Compound.

Cutting It Down to 15 Amino Acids

Large proteins are hard to make and study, so the team looked for the active part. They settled on a 15-amino-acid sequence that seemed to keep much of the protective effect in their rat models. This fragment was named BPC 157, and because it is short, it could be made by standard peptide synthesis.

Early Clinical Interest

In the 1990s and 2000s the Croatian drug company Pliva tested the peptide for inflammatory bowel disease under codes such as PL 14736. Papers from the Zagreb group describe these trials, but they did not lead to an approved product, and full results were not published in the main medical journals.

In 2015 a company registered a Phase 1 safety and pharmacokinetics study of a product called Bepecin in healthy volunteers (NCT02637284). The registry entry has not been updated since 2015 and lists no results.

Decades of Animal Studies

Over the next thirty years the Zagreb team and a smaller number of other groups published studies in rats on tendon and ligament injuries, muscle damage, bone defects, burns, bowel fistulas and blood vessel blockages. A 2003 rat study of cut Achilles tendons in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research became one of the most cited. Critics point out that most of this work has not been reproduced by fully independent laboratories.

From Laboratory to Internet

In the 2010s BPC-157 became popular in fitness and wellness communities, often described with words like "healing peptide". Sports authorities reacted: from 2022 the World Anti-Doping Agency has named it on its Prohibited List, and medical reviews began warning that public use had run far ahead of the evidence.

The First Human Reports and New Trials

• 2021: a US clinic published a retrospective survey of 16 patients who had received knee injections.
• 2024: the same clinic reported a pilot study in 12 women with interstitial cystitis.
• 2025: a two-person intravenous safety pilot followed.
• 2026: a placebo-controlled Phase 2 trial in 120 people with hamstring strains was registered in China (NCT07437547), and a small Phase 1 trial after rotator cuff surgery was registered in the United States (NCT07803250).

If these newer trials are completed and published, they will be the first properly controlled human data on BPC-157.