Who Discovered BPC-157? The Zagreb Research Programme

Where the sequence came from

BPC-157 did not emerge from a pharmaceutical development programme. It came out of gastroenterology research at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, beginning in the 1990s, into a protein fraction present in human gastric juice. The researchers named that fraction Body Protection Compound, and BPC-157 is a synthetic fifteen-residue sequence corresponding to a fragment of it.

This origin matters when reading the literature. The peptide sold today is a synthetic sequence made by solid-phase synthesis, not an extract of gastric juice, and the two should not be conflated in procurement documentation.

The Zagreb group, publishing under authors including Predrag Sikirić and Sven Seiwerth, remains the most prolific source of BPC-157 research. A large share of the indexed literature originates from that programme or from collaborators, which is a relevant fact when assessing how independent the evidence base is.

For research and laboratory use only. Not for human consumption, medical use, or personal application.

What the published work actually covers

Published studies concentrate on rodent models — tendon and ligament transection, muscle crush injury, gastrointestinal lesions — and on cell-culture assays measuring migration, angiogenic markers and inflammatory signalling. Seiwerth and colleagues summarised the wound-healing strand of this work in Frontiers in Pharmacology in 2021.

Independent review has been more cautious. A 2025 systematic review in HSS Journal by Vasireddi and colleagues examined the orthopaedic sports-medicine literature and found the controlled human evidence thin, which is a fair characterisation of the field as a whole.

No regulator has approved BPC-157 as a medicine. It is not registered with the UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention, the FDA or the EMA, and it appears on the World Anti-Doping Agency prohibited list — a compliance constraint for any laboratory connected to sport.

Reading the evidence honestly

A result in a rat tendon transection model describes that model. It is not evidence about people, and a laboratory qualifying BPC-157 as a test article should record it as a preclinical reference material rather than a therapeutic candidate.

The practical consequence for procurement is narrow and useful: confirm identity and purity on the lot in hand, document the certificate, and read published purity figures as belonging only to the batch they were measured on.

For research and laboratory use only. Not for human consumption, medical use, or personal application.