Origins & Effects of BPC-157 | Dr. Abud Bakri & Dr. Andrew Huberman

BPC-157

00:00Let's start with BPC57. What is it? What do we know about it? We'll explore safety and what is your stance on it from the perspective of a consumer and a clinician. So, first of all, what is BPC57? The best way to look at it is, you know, as humans, we've been looking for medicines in plants for thousands of years.

00:19And in the last, let's say 150 years, we've been looking for medicines in cells. So, animal derived versus plant plant derived medicines is the way to think about it. You think about aspirin, you think about metformin, the statins, those are all discovered in, you know, plant tissues.

00:32Um, statins more so fungi, but you get the point. Now, we've been looking into animal tissues to find cures, medicines, treatments. So, a group in Croatia in the '9s looks out for this peptide called BPC that they they and eventually named BPC.

00:50It's a $40,000 giant peptide called BPC. BBC57 is 15 amino acids from that giant peptide. We don't naturally make BPC57. That's what you'll commonly hear online. We make BPC the big uh protein. Did this group go looking for body protection compound?

01:08For those that aren't familiar in the laboratory, you can take a tissue, grind it up. You can do what's called fractionation. You can start separating basically cells and tissues and liquids according to the size of different proteins. Like different filters will bring let just like certain filters will let sand through or pebbles through or boulders through.

01:24That's kind of what you do. And then you figure out what the sequences are and then you throw them on cells or put them into animals and you try and figure out what they do. Why were they

Pavlov & Gastric Juices

01:32motivated to look for what eventually became BPC Pavlov the famous uh scientist that would do the dog the experiments on the dogs with the bell and and making the dogs salivate. The other work he did was on gastric juices of dogs. What he'd do is he'd put a hole in dogs stomachs.

01:47He would um feed them food and then get the gastric juices and sell that as a medicine. That's how he made his money. Yeah, that was part of his business. So, he got a Nobel Prize. He was also kind of like what did he have a like a um a call code?

01:58It was like like enter Pavlova for for discount at checkout. Yeah. Amazing. So, this is BBC before BBC57 exists. There's probably other peptides and compounds in there, but they they found that gastric juices had positive effects on healing on people that had, you know, gird and these kind of Wait, so people were taking BPC in the time of Pavlov?

02:18They didn't know what BBC was. They were taking gastric juices from dogs for what? GI distress, GI discomfort. Um, some people were trying for wound healing. There was a big push in this era for like finding animal tissues and putting them into humans.

02:29That science fizzled out. At the same time, there's a scientist Hanseli that's coming up with uh the stress adaptation theory. And he notices that animals are stressed out. Three things happens to them. Their adrenals get really big so they make more cortisol.

02:41Their gastric lining gets destroyed and then their thymus gland and their lymphatics shrink down. And he he has this published paper where you have clear adrenal from a stressed animal versus a non-stressed animal. A thymus from an animal that's stressed versus not.

02:53So this group is looking and thinking, hey, Pavlov had this gastric juice. Hansely said that there was damage when during stress. There must be some kind of cytorotective or organoprotective compound in the gut. The stomach is a very rich endocrine uh tissue.

03:09It makes grein all these other hormones. So they're like there must be something else in the gut juice that protects the gut lining from further damage. Were people drinking the gastric juices of dogs? Were they injecting them? Drinking was mo mostly what they did.

03:22And it was supposed to be a medical elixir presumably. It had many many things in it, many peptides. Pepsia and like upset stomach and this kind of stuff is what people were thinking. Do the reports point to the fact that it might have worked independent of what was sold on uh Dr.

03:35Pavlov's non-existent website. This was in like the early 1900s and then uh so was what 1930s I think. So yeah. Someone will correct us if we're wrong. And this other group

Identifying the Active Peptide

03:49in Croatia was 91. 91. Okay. Their first paper talks about this like hey there must be some kind of compound. They they identified the big 40 doton protein BPC and then they they were like what's what's causing the actual biological effects?

04:02They identified BPC57 the 15 amino acid peptide that's causing all these effects. There's actually more peptides in gastric juices that some other scientists may or may not have already identified. This field of peptides going to be very interesting because almost every organ has a signature of peptides.

04:16Like if you think back Dr. Vladimir Vulovich in 1850s 1880s finds carnosine and carnitine in muscle of cattle. So you can think about the first peptides that are found are carnosine and then carnitine is the amino acid that's that have positive effects on strength training and performance and different effects there.

04:36But that was the whole idea is like hey there's muscle peptides that may have muscle effects, right? Gut peptides might have gut effects. So this Croatian group um isolates this 15 amino acid kind of mini segment Yep. of BPC. They and others start injecting into mice inducing injuries to nerve to tendon.

04:53Maybe describe a few of those

Animal Research & Healing

04:55effects. I' I'm familiar with that literature, but I can tell that you are far more familiar with it. So, what are some of the impressive effects that they observed that led to where we are today? So, they did all kinds of horrible things to these mice.

05:06They would, you know, sever tendons and then give them BPC through oral or injectable intraparitinal uh administrations and they'd have faster healing times. They would sever ACL of the mice. they would uh do burn wounds. So when a patient has a burn wound in like the ICU, they end up having crazy gastric ulcers, but if they were able to put BBC on topically for the mouse, they would have no gastric ulcers.

05:27They name it as this anti-stress compound is how they they they look at it. Now, when they do that Achilles paper on the mice, that's what explodes the bodybuilder interest and leads us to today where we are like, oh, MSK injuries must be BPC, tendons and and and and muscle injuries.

05:41But the

Musculoskeletal vs Gastric Treatment

05:44original idea of BPC was to use it as a gastric treatment, not to use it as a muscular skeletal. What is so striking to me about BPC, and by the way, that's not an endorsement for BPC. Just what's so striking to me because my lab worked for a long time on optic nerve repair and [clears throat] neural regeneration.

05:58Nerves don't like to regenerate in the central nervous system, peripheral nervous system, they do it, they do it slowly, but they do it. Yep. Not in the central nervous system. Ask anyone [clears throat] who's had a stroke or an optic nerve injury.

06:07It's a tough road at best. There are data that I've seen with my own eyes that show that, you know, you can accelerate healing of tendon, of ligament, of nerve pathways in animals. Yes. In animals. Yes. Thank you. And that it just generally promotes quote unquote repair.

06:30Yep. That's kind of weird. It is weird. Right. Because I could spend the next 10 hours or more telling you about all the ways that people have tried to get nerves to regenerate and couldn't. And as you point out, this thing doesn't really have one specific at least known receptor.

06:45So the data on the gut make a lot of sense. This is after all a gut peptide. It makes sense that that gut peptide could get lots of places in the body,

Mechanisms of Biological Repair

06:52right? But what is it doing mechanistically if we know to support regeneration or replenishment of all these different tissue types? Because a neuron is a very different cell type than, you know, a fibiberblast or one of the bits of collagen that make up different connective tissues.

07:07It's modulating a lot of these growth and healing pathways. Like in the models of damaging the endothelial layer or the epithelial layer of different tissues, you'll get more veg f signaling. So that's the the vascular endothelial growth factor.

07:22So get more blood vessels andogenesis being formed which creates a lot of the controversy around BBC safety. You'll get cell migration especially when coupled with TB500 and TB4. you'll get, you know, more access of the healing factors to the area through androgenic pathways.

07:37On top of that, you'll get an anti-stress effect. So, the other big thing that they did was they'd give cortosteroids with BPC57 to these mice. And usually when you have a wound and you you give corticosteroids, the corticosteroids will slow or even stop the wound healing from happening.

07:51When BPC was administered, the the the healing was either the same or even better. Is BPC considered anti-inflammatory? Because based on what you just said, it almost seems like it helps maintain some of the pro-inflammatory response. Some people might be thinking, why would you want inflammation?

08:07What Dr. Baker just said is if you block inflammation with corticosteroids, you aren't going to call in the signals to repair tissues. So lowering inflammation is a dicey thing that maybe we set aside for later in the conversation if we have time.

08:21Is it thought that BPC is lowering inflammation or is just somehow hitting the gas pedal on all these regenerative restorative biological processes? It's more putting the gas pedal on these processes to bring in the immune system, the healing factors.

08:34For example, in one tendon model, they noticed that it increased the amount of growth hormone receptors on the tendon. So theoretically, this would allow more growth hormone to dock in and cause the outgrowth of the tendon and and the and the regrowth of it.

08:46So there's that theory there. downstream it'll modulate uh nitric oxide synthesis. So that's a big thing when it comes to wound healing because you need to to dilate the blood vessels, you need to call in different cells. So it's really changing the way cells behave at that level.

08:58But that's only for like the tendons side of it. They also did weird things on the neurological side. Like they would make these mice drunk, okay? And they would

Neurological Effects & Dopamine

09:09then give them BBC and they'd get less drunk and when they go through mazes. Oh boy. Okay. We did not just recommend you take BBC with alcohol. I want to be very clear. Um, but people are, you know, will do their own interpretation. So, I'm being semi-facicious, but very interesting.

09:24And then also, they would give them get the mice drunk and then have them withdraw from alcohol and like withdrawal is deadly. If we have a patient in the hospital that withdraws, they could die during that withdrawal if they're not giving bzodias beams.

09:32They got BPC and they didn't have the withdrawal symptoms. I'm like, what's going on here? This is a very interesting compound. I think it gets it gets all the hype for the msk stuff, but I think the neurological neuroscychiatric, let's say, and then gastric effects are way more interesting when it comes to that because it's modulating the gut brain access in an interesting way.

09:49We'll have people come to us and they're like, "My aderall is not working since I've been taking oral BPC." Are they happy with that effect? No, they're not happy. They're very mad because it seems like it's blunting their aderall. So, it's doing something from dopanergic signaling both on both sides, both withdrawal uh when it comes to like the gaponergic side, but also the the peak of signaling.

10:07So if you like peruse Reddit, which you should never do, um you'll find all these anhidonia discussions about BPC. People have feel like depressed and low energy. [music]