Croatian researchers thrust into limelight as their 1990s’ peptide discovery goes mainstream in the US

In the early 1990s, amid the bloody war tearing apart the former Yugoslavia, a team of researchers in Croatia working across biochemistry, pharmacology and medicine, published their discovery of a peptide that seemed to have amazing healing properties. They unofficially called the peptide the ‘God help substance ’ in a nod both to its apparently spectacular properties and to the war raging around them.

Their work on the peptide, which they isolated from human gastric juice and officially named body protection compound (BPC-157), continued quietly in the ensuing decades, leading to over 150 papers and 100 PhDs. A hypothesis related to the concept of ‘cytoprotection’ followed, suggesting how the peptide works by protecting blood vessels and, therefore, organs during stress, counteracting everything from tissue damage to brain diseases and even tumours in animal models.

However, several experts Chemistry World spoke to questioned these health claims, especially given that the peptide has not passed any significant openly-available human clinical trials, and said that its effectiveness or lack of in humans remains to be proven. The peptide did undergo small, early-stage human trials for ulcerative colitis in early 2000s by pharma company Pliva. However, these results were never fully published and the compound never progressed to a phase 3 trial. Human trials of BPC-157 are ‘very limited’ and ‘suffer from small sample sizes, lack of appropriate and broad-ranging controls, and insufficient randomization’, according to a March 2026 paper that reviewed human data on BPC-157.