Is BPC-157 Natural or Synthetic?
This sounds like a mere question. Is BPC-157 natural or synthetic? However, the solution is not as simple as both of the online camps would want you to think.
Look where you will you will find BPC-157 being said to be a natural healing factor found in the body, or a totally synthetic laboratory-derived chemical. Both descriptions possess some truths, but none of them convey the complete truth.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and the difference does really count rather much. It influences the way of the regulation of the compound, the way it is produced, the way it is controlled in its quality and the way it is being marketed in a sincere manner. Take off this, then, let us.
The source of BPC-157 does have its roots in the human body. That much is true.
Gastric juice is a complicated fluid that is generated by your stomach. It is a combination of hydrochloric acid, digestive enzymes, such as pepsin, mucins, and electrolytes and other proteins. Of such proteins, researchers in the early 1990s discovered one that they named BPC, short for Body Protection Compound.
This was the protein which interested them in a curious way. The stomach is a very hostile place. It immerses itself in acid strong enough to digest food, but it is able to avoid digesting its own lining. The BPC protein was found to have a part in that amazing self-protective and repair mechanism.
This protein was first reported by a Croatian research project which was headed by Predrag Sikiric in 1993 in the Journal of Physiology. They described it as a gastric peptide juice that has protective and curative abilities. Parent BPC protein weighs approximately 40,000 daltons, i.e it is a large molecular weight.
So, no, the tale of BPC-157 begins with something that is actually pretty natural; a defensive protein that is generated by your stomach as its natural biological process.
Here is where things shift. What people are actually reading about, what researchers use in research and what is sold on online markets is not the naturally occurring protein; it is the BPC-157. It is an artificial fragment of that protein.
The N-terminal end of the larger BPC protein has a certain 15-amino acid sequence that was identified by the researchers. This small fragment seemed to have the biological activity of the larger parent compound. That is the part of BPC-157 that we have today.
More importantly, this very 15-amino-acid sequence is not present as an independent molecule within the human body. It belongs to the bigger protein, but it does not stand itself free in your gastric juice. The sequence was isolated by scientists, recreated in a lab and found that behaved in biologically interesting ways.
The production of BPC-157 is known as Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis (SPS). This involves:
The whole procedure is chemical. The product does not require any human tissue, no gastric juice, or any biological substance of any living organism to be made. It is constructed using commercially obtained amino acid reagents in a laboratory.
The correct answer is: yes and no, depending upon what you mean.
Whether the idea behind BPC-157 is a creation of nature or not, the answer is yes. Its amino acid sequence was discovered through one of the curd protein that occurred naturally in human gastric juice. The biological inspiration is biological.
There is no yes or no to the question of whether the BPC-157 present in research and sold online is a natural product or not. It is entirely synthetic. It is synthesised in a lab by means of a chemical reaction. No one is removing it out of stomachs.
An analogy could also come in handy. Aspirin was first obtained using salicylic acid which is present in willow barks. But the brand of aspirin you purchase at a chemist is no tree bark powder. It is a drug that is produced under a pharmaceutical factory. The product is synthetic and the inspiration of the product is natural.
BPC-157 is no exception and one crucial distinction is that aspirin has decades of clinical trials and regulatory approval. BPC-157 has not.
Scientifically there were quite practical reasons why it was decided to synthesise BPC-157 instead of the previous attempts to extract the entire BPC protein out of gastric juice.
Biological fluid is the human gastric juice. Its use presents the risks of contamination, which includes possible exposures to viruses and other pathogens. It was just not safe as a source of raw material to use in any type of standardised research or production in any way.
Biological extraction yields inconsistent output. Depending on the individual, the amount of a particular protein in the gastric juice may vary with meal, day and day. The chemical synthesis, however, gives a specific product with known purity that can be confirmed by using analytical tests.
It is impossible to scale a supply chain that relies on the harvesting of human gastric juice. Laboratory synthesis can be grown to the demand be it milligrammes to a one experiment or grammes to a larger study.
Probably the strongest rationale was scientific. It was found that the small fragment of 15 amino-acids still had the biological activity of the large parent protein. No longer was there a necessity of working with the whole molecule when a small and readily produced fragment seemed to perform the same task.
It could be that you believe that this is mere semantics. However, the characterization of BPC-157 as being natural or synthetic has practical effects in a number of key fields.
The term natural has strong psychological effects. The perception of the products as natural gives the feeling that they are safer, gentler and more reliable compared to the synthetic products. Other vendors play on the gastric juice source of BPC-157 to suggest that the product is in some way natural and consequently safe.
That framing is misleading. The fact that a sequence in a compound was first identified in the body does not imply that the synthesised version is natural, neither does it say anything about its safety profile. There are plenty of harmful naturally occurring substances and also plenty of harmless synthetic substances. Even the natural-versus-synthetic label per se is not a significant predictor of either safety or efficacy.
The regulatory authorities give no special attention to BPC-157 due to its biological sources. In Australia, Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has listed it as a Schedule 4 prescription-only drug, and there are other restrictions of possession listed in Appendix D of the Poisons Standard. It is not registered under the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods.
The TGA has pointed at specific instances where online sellers label BPC-157 with warnings such as not to be used therapeutically or only for research purposes as an attempt to get around existing restrictions. No matter how the product is being marketed, its regulatory position is quite evident:
This is probably the most practically significant implication of the fact that BPC-157 is synthetic. Since it is a manufactured product, it is a product that relies entirely on the manufacturing process. And since it is not a validated therapeutic drug, there is no regulatory body to make sure that manufacturers are of any specific standard.
That means:
This is among the most frequent arguments you will find on the Internet and this statement is worth paying certain attention to since it is mistaken, but in an insidious way.
The reasoning is as follows: “BPC-157 can be found naturally in your stomach, and thus taking it will only provide your body with more of what it already synthesises. It is logical in principle. But it disintegrates on examination.
Here is why:
Natural origin does not mean safety. This is a fallacy of reason that is also referred to as the appeal to nature. Arsenic is natural. Botulinum toxin is natural. The source of a substance will not give you any information regarding whether that substance is safe to use in a certain manner and at a particular dose.
When you peruse the scientific source on BPC-157, you will observe that scientists tend to be very specific with their words. The compound can be most generally stated to be:
It is seldom that you will find a respectable scientist referring to it as mere nature. The peer-reviewed literature is more likely to frame it as a synthetic compound of natural origin. That difference can be seen as minor, though scientifically crucial.
It is sometimes stated in the literature that BPC-157 is a naturally occurring gastric peptide, but this is normally the presence of the parent protein in gastric juice, and not the synthetic fragment that has been used in laboratory studies. The wording can be the source of the real confusion even among the research community.
The ability to be very stable is one of the most peculiar properties of BPC-157. Majority of the peptides are delicate compounds that decompose easily in the body especially in the acidic conditions in the stomach. That is among the significant problems with peptide-based research in general.
BPC-157 bucks this trend. Research has indicated that it is stable in human gastric juice up to over 24 hours. This stability is because researchers think that it has a structural composition, especially that it has four proline residues (a four-proline repeat) within the 15-amino-acid chain. Proline forms fixed kinks in the structure of the peptide, and it might render the structure immune to the enzymes that would otherwise degrade a peptide.
This is one of the reasons why the compound has received a lot of research attention. The existence of a peptide that is resistant to stomach digestion opens up the option of oral administration, which is much more convenient in most scenarios than injection.
Natural-versus-synthetic question is not an academic one only. It defines the thinking patterns of the people regarding BPC-157 and the evaluation of the risks and the risks of victimising themselves to misleading marketing.
The following is a simple outline of the real situation:
Excellently safe in humans: Not yet. Preclinical results are positive, but there is no data of long-term human safety.
There is a very real interesting position occupied by BPC-157. It is an artificial substance that is a replica of a natural biological process. The order of its sequence is determined by the protective mechanisms of the body, but the product itself is produced in a chemistry laboratory out of commercially available amino acid reagents.
Natural and synthetic are not exhaustive descriptions of what BPC-157 is. The most truthful explanation is that it is a man-made created peptide whose sequence was first of all based on a naturally occurring protein in human gastric juice.
The knowledge of this difference is not a question of being pedantic. It is concerned with creating a knowledgeable opinion through what the compound is and not what the marketing rhetoric wants it to be. And where hype is the order of the day, such clarity is important.