Wendy Zuckerman

So you know immediately that it was not discovered by Hassi's team.

It was isolated from gastric juice in the early 1990s by a Croatian lab.

And what's curious is that humans don't actually make BPC-157.

You can't find it in our DNA.

So the going theory is that maybe a gut bug makes it?

We don't know.

But the big question is, can it heal you?

For this, I called up Keith Barr, a professor of molecular exercise physiology at University of California, Davis.

Yeah, he wanted to see if BPC-157 can really heal tendons and ligaments, which can be very difficult injuries to treat.

So it would be great if all you needed was one cheeky injection and off you go.

And here's how Keith tested it.

His first step is basically building a little tendon in a dish.

Keith's team takes the roughed up cells of the human tendon, embeds them in a gel, puts it all on a tiny bone-like scaffolding, and then yadda yadda yadda, the cells will start to replicate.

Wow.

That's so cool.

The model will grow to about the size of a toothpick, and then he's ready to test it.

So the team exposes the tendon to, say, different peptides and basically sees what happens.

And he told me that often it's pretty obvious if it's doing something.

And they've seen this with another peptide called insulin-like growth factor 1.

Some people, in particular bodybuilders, use IGF-1 to get stronger.