Biohackers are Reaching for Wolverine Peptides - McGill University

I must admit that I have never seen a “Wolverine” movie even though Hugh Jackman is one of my favourite performers. He was fantastic in the Broadway revival of The Music Man, excellent in The Greatest Showman and made a very good Jean Valjean in Les Miz. But now I’m going to have to watch at least one of the films in which he appears as “Wolverine” to see why that name has been hijacked by biohackers.

Biohackers are individuals who try to optimize their health, mental function, athletic performance and longevity by manipulating their diet, sleep pattern and exercise habits as well as their exposure to light, heat and cold. They generally take a host of supplements and unapproved prescription medications and commonly monitor their blood for various markers they believe reflect the success of their regimens. One of the current biohacking trends is self-injection with what has been termed the “Wolverine” stack despite a lack of evidence of safety or efficacy.

As I now understand, Wolverine, the Marvel comics superhero, was born a “mutant,” meaning he has a mythical “X” gene that gives him his superpowers and an ability to quickly recover from almost any injury. That is just what “biohackers” are after! But what are they actually treating themselves with?

The Wolverine stack consists of two peptides referred to on social media as BPC-157 and TB-500, neither of which is approved for any use by Health Canada or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. These peptides are usually obtained on the “gray” market from producers in China which brings up the question of purity since their production is not monitored by any government authority. The popularity of The Wolverine stack has increased in the last few years due to anecdotal testimonials on social media and promotion by influencers such as Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both of whom have experimented with peptides. Kennedy, as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, was instrumental in encouraging a panel of FDA advisors to vote for allowing compounding pharmacies to produce certain peptides. Previously this had not been allowed due to insufficient human data. The advisory panel’s recommendation is not binding, and the FDA will have to decide whether compounding pharmacies will be allowed to market certain peptides.

Curiously, in Canada peptides can be produced using a legal loophole. Health Canada considers the compounding of an oral Natural Health Product as a private arrangement between a practitioner and a patient making it distinct from pharmaceutical manufacture which is carefully regulated. Why BPC-157 should be considered a Natural Health Product is not clear. While its parent compound is found in gastric juice and is “natural,” BPC-157 is synthetic. Neither is it clear where the compounding pharmacies are getting it. They are not equipped with peptide synthesizers and are likely buying the peptide from China. In any case, some doctors in Canada are sending interested would-be users to compounding pharmacies. Never mind that the oral version is likely to be digested in the stomach before making it into the bloodstream.

BPC-157 and TB-500 have different histories. Body Protection Compound 157 is the one that has received the most social media fanfare and traces back to research in the 1980s by Predrag Sikiric and colleagues in Croatia who were interested in why acidic gastric juices do not harm the lining of the stomach. They isolated a protein that appeared to protect the stomach lining and tracked its effectiveness to a particular 15 amino acid segment of the protein. They then synthesized a peptide with the same sequence of 15 amino acids with hopes of using it as an anti-ulcer treatment.

When this peptide was tested on animals, it was indeed found to have a healing effect and not only on ulcers but also on injuries to tendons and muscles. There were some early human trials, but no results were ever published. To this date, there have been no clinical trials that would justify the use of BPC-157 on the scale being used by biohackers. Scattered information has been gathered from people who have used the peptide for gastrointestinal problems or chronic pain with some reports of benefits but often subjects were also using other forms of medication. Side effects, mostly gastric upset and skin rashes have also been reported. In the absence of proper randomized, double-blind trials it is not possible to come up with a benefit-risk analysis for the use of BPC-157.

Similarly, TB-500 lacks any evidence from clinical trials. It’s parent compound, a 43-amino acid protein known as “thymosin beta-4” was isolated from calf thymus gland tissue in the 1990s. The thymus gland, located in the upper chest behind the breastbone is of interest because of the role it plays in immune function which includes repairing tissue after damage by inflammation. The 43-amino acid protein was found to enhance wound healing in some animal trials and was adopted by the mostly unregulated greyhound and horse racing industries.

As with BPC-157, the healing effect was supposedly traced to a segment of the protein. TB-500 is not exactly defined with the term being used to describe various synthetic segments of the thymus protein. Like BPC-157, it has been embraced by some as a performance enhancing and anti-aging peptide even though neither substance was originally developed for such a purpose. Their reputation for endowing Wolverine-like benefits is based on biochemical plausibility and extrapolation from animal experiments. Now I’ll have to watch the movie to find out how the character got his name, but I imagine it has to do with the wolverine being a ferocious little animal with strength out of proportion to its size. As far as the Wolverine stack goes, I think the evidence is out of proportion to its hype.