Peptide / SubQ, Oral / 250-500mcg 1-2x daily

BPC-157*

BPC-157 came out of a screening program at the University of Zagreb that fractionated human gastric juice looking for cytoprotective peptides. It reached randomized human trials for ulcerative colitis under a Croatian drug company, stalled there, and every route to its current widespread use ran through the grey market rather than through a regulator.

In plain words

BPC-157 is a small lab-made peptide, a 15-amino-acid piece of a protective substance found in human stomach juice. People buy it hoping it will speed up healing of tendons, ligaments and joints, or settle gut problems. Almost everything known about it comes from animals: in a review of the muscle-and-joint literature, 35 of 36 studies were preclinical and none were randomized trials in people. The human record is very thin. One randomized trial, in ulcerative colitis, was published only as a meeting abstract and supports tolerability rather than effectiveness, and the few other published reports, among them a two-person safety pilot and an uncontrolled chart review, cannot show that it works or that it is safe. No BPC-157 product is approved anywhere in the world, so it is sold as a research chemical or as a supplement ingredient by sellers who are not required to test what is in the vial, and the World Anti-Doping Agency banned it in 2022.

At a glance

Half-life	0.17 days
Tmax	0.04 days
Route(s)	SubQ, Oral
Published dosing range	250-500mcg 1-2x daily
Vial strengths	5, 10 mg

Reference data from the DosePlot canon -- not a protocol recommendation.

Serum curve

Single 375 mcg dose by SubQ, rendered from the same engine that powers the interactive chart. Relative levels, not lab values.

Chart this compound

What does the evidence show?

Two things are labeled separately here because they answer different questions. The tier is how a study was built. The distance chips are whether that study touched this molecule, by this route, in a population resembling the reader. A randomized trial of a different molecule keeps its tier and still says nothing about this compound.

Finding	Tier	Distance from use	Study
In rats, BPC 157 protected the gastric mucosa against lesions produced by 96 percent ethanol, restraint stress, and indomethacin, at doses of 10 mcg/kg and 10 ng/kg given intraperitoneally. Gastroprotection is what the compound was screened for, and the gastrointestinal work is the oldest part of its literature.	preclinical	not recorded	Sikiric P, Seiwerth S, Grabarevic Z, et al. Beneficial effect of a novel pentadecapeptide BPC 157 on gastric lesions induced by restraint stress, ethanol, indomethacin, and capsaicin neurotoxicity.Digestive Diseases and Sciences 41(8):1604-1614, 1996
After a rat Achilles tendon was surgically detached from the calcaneal bone, BPC 157 improved tendon-to-bone healing on functional, biomechanical, and histological measures, and reduced the healing impairment caused by a corticosteroid given alongside it.	preclinical	not recorded	Krivic A, Anic T, Seiwerth S, Huljev D, Sikiric P. Achilles detachment in rat and stable gastric pentadecapeptide BPC 157: promoted tendon-to-bone healing and opposed corticosteroid aggravation.Journal of Orthopaedic Research 24(5):982-989, 2006
BPC 157 improved healing of a surgically transected medial collateral ligament in rats over 90 days, on functional, biomechanical, macroscopic, and histological measures. The same study found it effective given intraperitoneally, topically at the injury site, and by mouth in drinking water, which is the usual basis for the claim that the oral route works.	preclinical	not recorded	Cerovecki T, Bojanic I, Brcic L, et al. Pentadecapeptide BPC 157 (PL 14736) improves ligament healing in the rat.Journal of Orthopaedic Research 28(9):1155-1161, 2010
The proposed mechanism for the healing effects is vascular. In rats with hind-limb ischemia and in cultured human endothelial cells, BPC 157 increased expression and internalization of VEGFR2 and activated the VEGFR2-Akt-eNOS pathway, without raising VEGF-A itself.	preclinical	not recorded	Hsieh MJ, Liu HT, Wang CN, et al. Therapeutic potential of pro-angiogenic BPC157 is associated with VEGFR2 activation and up-regulation.Journal of Molecular Medicine (Berlin) 95(3):323-333, 2017
One randomized controlled trial of BPC-157 has reported efficacy results. A multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 randomized 53 subjects with mild-to-moderate ulcerative colitis 1:1 to an 80 mg enema of PL 14736 or placebo once daily for two weeks, and 46 completed. The compound was reported as well tolerated, with no difference in the frequency or type of adverse events against placebo. It was published only as a meeting abstract, with the primary endpoint loosely defined, so it supports tolerability rather than effectiveness. The FDA's 2026 literature review identified five clinical studies of BPC-157 in total and found this the only randomized efficacy trial among them.	rct	not recorded	Ruenzi M, Stolte M, Veljaca M, Oreskovic K, Peterson J, UCS Group. A multicenter, randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled Phase II study of PL 14736 enema in the treatment of mild-to-moderate ulcerative colitis.Gastroenterology 128:A584, 2005
The only published report of intravenous BPC-157 in humans is a two-person pilot at a private Florida clinic. Two adults received 10 mg on the first day and 20 mg on the second, each infused over an hour, with no adverse effects reported and no clinically significant change in cardiac, liver, kidney, thyroid, or glucose markers. The authors concluded that the pilot showed safety and that further studies are needed to confirm it. No plasma concentrations were taken, so the study carries no pharmacokinetic information, and two subjects cannot establish safety.	clinical	not recorded	Lee E, Burgess K. Safety of intravenous infusion of BPC157 in humans: a pilot study.Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 31(5):20-24, 2025
A retrospective chart review of a single private clinic followed patients given intra-articular BPC 157 for knee pain. Of the 12 who received the peptide alone, 11 reported meaningful improvement in a telephone survey. There was no control group, no blinding, and no validated outcome measure.	clinical	not recorded	Lee E, Padgett B. Intra-articular injection of BPC 157 for multiple types of knee pain.Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 27(4):8-13, 2021
Community protocols converge on 250-500 mcg once or twice daily by subcutaneous injection, often placed near the injured tendon or joint on the theory that local concentration matters. Oral capsules are used instead for gut complaints. No published human study has compared these schedules against each other, and none has tested a subcutaneous or oral regimen against placebo. The randomized human work used rectal enemas in ulcerative colitis.	anecdotal	not recorded	community reports aggregated from reddit, MESO-Rx, and similar forumsno study

How did it get here?

preclinical1992-1993: Sikiric and colleagues at the University of Zagreb describe Body Protection Compound, a family of protective peptide fractions from gastric juice, and then report a 15-residue fragment of it under the designation BPC 157. The peptide is a fragment of something the stomach already makes, not a molecule designed from scratch.
first-human2000-2007: Pliva (Croatia) develops the peptide as a drug for inflammatory bowel disease under the codes PL-10, PLD-116, and PL 14736, and takes it into human trials in ulcerative colitis. Both are randomized: a placebo-controlled Phase 1 in 32 healthy male volunteers, 24 of whom receive the peptide, and a multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 in 53 patients with mild-to-moderate disease. Both report tolerability with no separation from placebo on adverse events. Both appear only as meeting abstracts in journal supplements rather than as full papers, and development stops there.
grey-market2010-2021: With no approved product anywhere in the world, BPC-157 is sold as a research chemical and used off-label for tendon, ligament, and joint injuries. Demand is driven by the animal healing studies, not by any human result. Sellers are not required to test identity, purity, or sterility, and generally do not. A second channel runs alongside it: the peptide is marketed in the United States as an ingredient in dietary supplements sold as oral capsules and tablets, and no United States Pharmacopeia monograph exists for the free base or the acetate as a drug substance or as a supplement ingredient.
grey-market2022: The World Anti-Doping Agency adds BPC-157 to the Prohibited List under section S0, non-approved substances. It is the first time WADA names a specific substance as an example in that section, and because BPC-157 is not approved for human use anywhere, no therapeutic use exemption is possible.
grey-market2023: In its September 2023 update, the US Food and Drug Administration places BPC-157 in Category 2 of its interim policy on bulk drug substances, citing immunogenicity risk by some routes, difficulty characterizing peptide-related impurities and the active ingredient, and limited safety information. Compounding pharmacies are effectively shut out.
grey-market2026: Both compounding nominations are withdrawn, and in April the agency moves BPC-157 onto the withdrawn-nominations table of its Category 2 list, restating the same concerns. FDA evaluates the substance on its own initiative anyway and proposes not adding it to the 503A Bulks List, citing weak physicochemical characterization, limited safety information, insufficient evidence of effectiveness in ulcerative colitis, and the existence of approved treatments for that disease. At the advisory committee meeting on July 23-24 the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee disagrees and votes to recommend inclusion over the agency's objection. The single use the agency evaluated was ulcerative colitis, the old Pliva indication, not the tendon and joint healing that nearly all current use is for. A committee vote is a recommendation: as of late August the rule listing compoundable bulk substances still names six substances, and BPC-157 is not among them.

How is it made?

Production happens in three stages.

1. Building the chain. BPC-157 is assembled by solid-phase peptide synthesis. The last residue, valine, is anchored to a resin bead, and the other fourteen amino acids are added one at a time, each cycle unmasking the growing end of the chain and coupling the next protected residue onto it. Fifteen residues means fourteen couplings. Four involve proline, three of those consecutive, and proline couples slowly. A cycle that does not run to completion leaves chains missing a residue, close enough to the real product to pass a careless assay.

2. Cleaving and purifying. Strong acid releases the finished chain from the resin and strips the protecting groups in one step. The crude peptide is precipitated, then separated from deletion products and reagent residues by reversed-phase chromatography. Mass spectrometry confirms identity against an expected mass near 1419. The peptide is usually isolated as an acetate salt, which is why regulatory documents list the free base and the acetate as separate substances.

3. Filling the vial. The purified peptide is dissolved, sterile-filtered, dispensed, and freeze-dried to a white cake, then sealed and stored cold. What varies outside regulated manufacturing is everything after it: how much of the labeled mass is the intended 15-residue peptide, whether the fill was sterile, and whether anyone tested either. The FDA's stated concerns about compounding it were the impurity profile, characterization of the active ingredient, immunogenicity risk by some routes, and limited safety information, not the synthesis chemistry.

Worth knowing

The 157 is a catalogue number. Body Protection Compound was a series of peptide fractions screened at the University of Zagreb in the early 1990s, and a 2026 review of the compound's development records the numeral as identifying this sequence as the 157th candidate from that program. The name describes a position in a list, not a structure or a target.

Mateescu DM, Gavrilescu DM, Constantinescu FE, et al. BPC-157 as an investigational peptide therapeutic: biopharmaceutical challenges, formulation strategies, and translational development barriers.Pharmaceutics 18(5):625, 2026

Its resistance to stomach acid is credited to geometry rather than to any chemical modification. The sequence GEPPPGKPADDAGLV carries four prolines out of fifteen residues, three of them consecutive at positions 3 through 5. Proline is a ring-containing amino acid that restricts how the backbone can bend, and the run of three is thought to adopt a shape a protease cannot easily grip. The explanation is standard and unproven: the same review notes that it has not been confirmed by circular dichroism, nuclear magnetic resonance, or X-ray crystallography, and that the peptide's solution structure remains uncharacterized. What is measured is the survival itself, in gastric juice at pH 1 to 2 carrying pepsin at 0.5 to 1 mg/mL, conditions that rapidly destroy the large majority of therapeutic peptides.

The first formal pharmacokinetic study, published in 2022, found an elimination half-life under 30 minutes in both rats and beagle dogs, with absolute bioavailability after intramuscular injection of 14-19 percent in rats but 45-51 percent in dogs. Two species differ threefold on the same measure, and the reported biological effects last hours to days while the peptide itself is gone in minutes. Neither the species gap nor that mismatch has been resolved in humans, so no animal number transfers cleanly onto a human dosing schedule.

He L, Feng D, Guo H, et al. Pharmacokinetics, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of body-protective compound 157, a potential drug for treating various wounds, in rats and dogs.Frontiers in Pharmacology 13:1026182, 2022

Reconstitution

BPC-157* ships lyophilized and is mixed before use; the published vial strengths are 5, 10 mg. The water volume you add sets the concentration, not the dose -- the calculator turns a vial size and a water volume into mg/mL, draw volume, and units on an insulin syringe.

Open in the reconstitution calculator

Written and reviewed by Evan Marlow, developer of DosePlot · Updated 2026-08-27

Not medical advice. DosePlot is an informational tool, not a healthcare provider, and using it creates no provider-patient relationship. Do not start, stop, or change any protocol without the approval of a licensed healthcare professional.

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