Hold lyophilized BPC 157 sealed, desiccated and dark at minus 20 °C for long-term storage, or at 2 to 8 °C as working stock inside a recorded window. Let the sealed vial reach room temperature before opening. Once dissolved it becomes a dated, refrigerated liquid measured in days.
- BPC 157 is a fifteen-residue synthetic peptide, GEPPPGKPADDAGLV, formula C62H98N16O22, average mass about 1419.5 daltons.
- The sequence carries no aromatic residue, so purity must be measured at 214 nm; a 280 nm figure for this compound is baseline noise.
- Chromatographic purity is an area percentage and net peptide content is a mass figure; a lot can show 99% purity and 80% net content.
- No USP/NF monograph exists for BPC 157, so any shelf-life figure without a lot-specific stability study behind it is a convention.
- Dry, sealed, desiccated storage at minus 20 °C is the slowest regime, and condensation from opening a cold vial is the most common avoidable loss.
- The FDA placed BPC 157 in Category 2 of the 503A bulks list effective 29 September 2023 and removed it in April 2026 without moving it to Category 1.
Identity: what the vial is supposed to contain
BPC 157 is a synthetic pentadecapeptide. Fifteen residues, no disulfide bridge, no lipid conjugate, nothing exotic left on the finished article. The sequence is Gly-Glu-Pro-Pro-Pro-Gly-Lys-Pro-Ala-Asp-Asp-Ala-Gly-Leu-Val, written in single-letter code as GEPPPGKPADDAGLV. The name comes from the literature that introduced it, where the sequence is described as part of a protein found in human gastric juice. Body Protection Compound is what the initials stand for.
Everything else in the identity record follows from that composition by arithmetic. The free peptide is C62H98N16O22, average mass close to 1419.5 daltons and monoisotopic mass close to 1418.70. Suppliers almost always ship the acetate salt; an arginate form is also sold. Neither counterion changes the peptide. Both change the reading on the balance, which is where most concentration disagreements start.
One structural feature earns more attention than its size suggests. The sequence contains no phenylalanine, tyrosine or tryptophan, so nothing in the molecule absorbs usefully at 280 nm. That single fact decides how a purity method has to be built, and it is the quickest thing to check on a certificate written by someone who never looked at the sequence.
| Field | Value | Why it appears here |
|---|---|---|
| Class | Synthetic linear pentadecapeptide | Fifteen residues, no cyclisation, no disulfide |
| Sequence | GEPPPGKPADDAGLV | The claim every identity assay is tested against |
| Molecular formula | C62H98N16O22 | Follows from the residue composition |
| Average mass | About 1419.5 Da | The figure a certificate usually quotes |
| Monoisotopic mass | About 1418.70 Da | The figure an ESI-MS trace is read against |
| Usual salt form | Acetate | Counterion mass counts toward the labelled weight |
| Aromatic residues | None | No usable 280 nm absorbance; detect at 214 nm |
| Compendial monograph | None | No official standard defines an acceptable article |
The names on the invoice
The compound travels under more names than a fifteen-residue peptide deserves. Paperwork carries BPC-157, BPC157, BPC 157 with a space, pentadecapeptide BPC 157, Body Protection Compound 157, and in older literature the development code PL 14736. Two misspellings turn up often enough to recognise on sight: bpc 175 and bcp 157. Neither is a different substance. Both break a search of your own records, which is the moment a traceability chain quietly stops being one.
Blends complicate the arithmetic more than the identity. A combined BPC 157 and TB-500 vial labelled 10 mg holds 5 mg of each, and reading the total as though it were the single-compound figure puts every downstream concentration out by half. The label should state the split. Where it does not, the vial is undocumented no matter how good the purity number looks.
A registry number is worth checking and worth not over-trusting. Where a supplier prints one, confirm the same number appears on the listing, the certificate and the vial label. A registry number is an index entry. It records that somebody catalogued a structure. It says nothing about the powder in front of you, and treating its presence as verification is how a well-formatted document passes for evidence.
Confirming identity by mass
For a peptide this size, identity is a mass measurement, usually electrospray ionisation on an LC-MS system so the mass is tied to a chromatographic peak instead of to whatever happened to be in the source at the time. Short peptides ionise readily and multiply charged ions dominate the spectrum.
The numbers to expect fall out of the formula. Against a monoisotopic mass near 1418.70 daltons, the singly protonated ion sits near m/z 1419.71 and the doubly protonated ion near m/z 710.36. A sodium adduct on the doubly charged species shifts it up by roughly 11 m/z units, which is a common sight in a real spectrum and not a defect by itself. Confirmation means a deconvoluted mass within a few tenths of a dalton of the calculated value, reported with the instrument and the date it ran.
What mass cannot settle deserves saying plainly. Isomers are isobaric. An aspartate that has isomerised at position 10 or 11 weighs exactly what the parent weighs, and no mass measurement will separate the two. A scrambled sequence of the same composition weighs the same as well. Retention time against a reference standard closes part of that gap and tandem fragmentation closes the rest. Counterion and residual water are invisible to the technique, so a clean spectrum says nothing whatsoever about how much peptide the vial holds.
Purity, and the wavelength trap
Purity on a research certificate means reversed-phase HPLC area percent, almost always a C18 column with a water and acetonitrile gradient and 0.1% trifluoroacetic acid in both phases. Detection belongs at 214 nm, where the amide backbone absorbs. Since this sequence carries no aromatic residue, a purity figure reported at 280 nm for BPC 157 is a measurement of baseline noise. It appears on real certificates often enough to check before anything else on the page.
Area percent is a ratio among the species that eluted and absorbed. It is not a mass fraction of the vial. Water, acetate counterion and inorganic salts contribute nothing to the chromatogram and a good deal to the weight, which is how a single lot can honestly show 99% chromatographic purity alongside 80% net peptide content. The two numbers answer different questions and neither one stands in for the other.
The impurities that matter are the ones solid-phase synthesis produces: deletion sequences missing a residue, capped failure sequences, and for this molecule the isomerised aspartate species that elute close to the main peak. A shallow gradient resolves them. A short isocratic run does not, so a 99.4% figure from a four-minute method describes the resolving power of the method more than the quality of the lot.
| Assay | Question it answers | What it cannot tell you |
|---|---|---|
| RP-HPLC, UV 214 nm | Relative proportion of UV-absorbing species | Nothing about salt, water or non-absorbing contaminants |
| ESI-MS or LC-MS | Whether the measured mass matches the claimed sequence | Cannot separate isomers or see the counterion |
| Amino acid analysis | Net peptide content, the real mass of peptide per vial | Destroys the sample; often absent from low-cost certificates |
| Karl Fischer titration | Residual water in the lyophilized solid | Silent on identity and on chromatographic purity |
| Ion chromatography | Acetate or other counterion content | Relevant only to the mass balance |
| Appearance and solubility | Whether the cake is intact and dissolves as expected | Observational; no substitute for an instrument |
Storage conditions by physical state
Storage here is ordinary lyophilized-peptide practice, and the sequence buys a little slack inside that practice instead of a different one. There is no methionine, cysteine or tryptophan to oxidise, and no asparagine or glutamine to deamidate, so two routes that dominate peptide degradation are structurally unavailable to this molecule. Backbone hydrolysis is still available, and it needs nothing except water.
| State | Condition | Relative horizon | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sealed powder, long term | Minus 20 °C or below, desiccated, dark | Longest | Water excluded and every remaining route slowed |
| Sealed powder, working stock | 2 to 8 °C, dark | Shorter than frozen | Defensible inside a defined, recorded window |
| Powder in transit | Ambient, insulated, dark | Days | A dry solid tolerates excursions a solution does not |
| Prepared solution | 2 to 8 °C, dark, dated | Days, not months | Hydrolysis now has water; contamination has a medium |
| Solution in single-use aliquots | Minus 20 °C or below | Longer, at a cost per thaw | Freeze-thaw aggregation accumulates invisibly |
The horizons are relative on purpose. Putting a number of months on a research powder takes a stability study run on that lot, in that container, under those conditions, and with no monograph obliging anyone to run one, a confident figure in a listing is a convention wearing the clothes of a measurement. Where a lot certificate carries a retest date, that is the only date entitled to be quoted, and where it carries none the window is unestablished. Write that word in the record; it is more useful than a guess.
The failure that costs the most is mechanical. Cold glass sits below the dew point of room air, so a vial opened straight from the freezer takes on condensation, and a lyophilized cake absorbs it with no change in appearance at all. Let the sealed vial reach room temperature first, every time, which for a small vial usually means twenty to thirty minutes on the bench. The full mechanism sits in the storage and stability guide and applies to every dry peptide, this one included.
Preparing a solution and writing it down
Both stocked sizes reach the same figure through unremarkable arithmetic. A 5 mg vial into 1 mL of diluent gives
5 mg / 1 mL = 5 mg/mL
and a 10 mg vial into 2 mL lands in the same place:
10 mg / 2 mL = 5 mg/mL
That arithmetic is gross mass. Where the certificate reports net peptide content, careful work starts from the net figure instead: 10 mg x 0.85 = 8.5 mg, and 8.5 mg / 2 mL = 4.25 mg/mL. Two laboratories preparing identical vials can write down 5 and 4.25 and both be correct. The only record that is wrong is the one that does not say which basis it used. The vial concentration calculator handles other vial sizes and volumes, and the cost-per-milligram tool compares the two sizes on the basis that matters when ordering.
Diluent choice follows the entry pattern of the container, not the chemistry of the compound. A vial that will be entered repeatedly over days wants a preserved diluent; single-session work gains nothing from one. The argument is set out in the BAC water guide. Whichever is used, divide the solution into single-use portions at the moment of preparation and date each one as it is filled. Freeze-thaw damage accumulates, does not reverse, and looks like nothing.
The preparation record carries the source lot identifier, the diluent and its lot, the volume added, the resulting concentration with its basis stated, the date and time, and the initials of whoever did the work. Aliquots inherit that record through a shared identifier written on every tube. When a result reads wrong three months later, this chain answers the first question in a minute; a gap in it means repeating the experiment.
Reading the certificate of analysis
With no monograph in the picture, the certificate is the entire evidentiary basis for a lot, and most of what separates a useful one from a decorative one is visible in half a minute. A useful certificate names the lot, and that lot number is printed on the vial in your hand. It names the method behind every number it reports, including column, gradient and detection wavelength for the chromatographic figure. It gives the date the analysis ran and states whether the laboratory that ran it was the manufacturer or an independent one. It attaches the chromatogram and the mass spectrum instead of transcribing two numbers into a table.
The failure patterns are equally visible. A certificate with no lot identifier ties to nothing. A certificate whose retention times match the previous lot to two decimal places is a template with fresh numbers typed into it. Purity quoted to a tenth of a percent with no chromatogram attached is a claim about a claim. And a document reporting purity at 280 nm for a peptide with no aromatic residues shows that whoever prepared it was not reading the sequence.
Two things sit outside the certificate and belong in the same file. What a supplier commits to documenting on every lot is a policy question, covered in the quality standard. How the material travelled and in what condition it arrived is a logistics question, covered under shipping. Current sizes for this compound are listed on the BPC 157 product record. None of the three replaces a lot-specific document with a method and a date on it.
Regulatory status, with dates
BPC 157 appears in a preclinical research literature. No FDA-approved product contains it, and no USP/NF monograph defines what an acceptable article of the substance is, which is why the lot certificate carries as much weight on this page as it does.
The compounding position has changed more than once. The FDA placed BPC 157 in Category 2 of the 503A bulk drug substances list, the category for substances that may present significant safety risks, effective with the agency's update of 29 September 2023. In April 2026 the agency removed it from Category 2 after the nomination supporting the listing was withdrawn. Removal is not promotion: the substance was not added to Category 1 or to the bulks permitted for 503A compounding, and BPC-157-related substances were before the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee again on 23 July 2026. Anyone relying on this status should read the current list rather than a supplier's summary, this one included.
Status verified 25 August 2026.
FOR LABORATORY AND IN-VITRO RESEARCH USE ONLY. NOT FOR HUMAN OR ANIMAL CONSUMPTION. NOT FOR PERSONAL, MEDICAL, DIAGNOSTIC, THERAPEUTIC, OR RECREATIONAL USE.
Common questions
How should lyophilized BPC 157 be stored?
What is the sequence and molecular mass of BPC 157?
How is the identity of a BPC 157 lot confirmed?
Why must BPC 157 purity be measured at 214 nm?
Does 99% purity mean the vial is 99% peptide?
Is BPC 157 approved, and does it have an official expiry date?
Sources
- PubChem compound record for BPC 157. Sequence and structure of the free peptide; the molecular formula and masses quoted here follow from that residue composition.
- FDA 503A bulk drug substances list and Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee materials, 2023 to 2026. Category 2 placement effective 29 September 2023, the April 2026 removal following withdrawal of the nomination, and the 23 July 2026 committee review.
- USP general chapter on chromatography. System suitability and reporting expectations that a chromatographic purity figure should be able to point back to, in the absence of any monograph for this substance.
- ICH Q1A(R2), stability testing of new drug substances and products. The framework a defensible retest date requires; cited to make clear what a supplier figure quoted without such a study is not.