Dexamethasone is orally available too but the general wisdom is that it's better used as a targeted injection. BPC-157 isn't well studied in humans so I wouldn't expect there to be any evidence either way.
What do you mean by "general wisdom" and "targeted injection"?
We are explicitly trained in the ED that oral steroids have been proven equivalently effective and much cheaper than parenteral administration, and so should be preferred for patients that can take them by mouth.
Is that true? Genuinely asking. Because all of the "conventional wisdom" I've picked up is that ingesting it works great for stomach ailments like ulcers with a small amount of 'fixing' throughout the rest of the body. But if you sprained your knee, you're better off injecting it at the knee site than eating it. People and probable placebo seem to think injecting really targets it.
Is subcutaneous injection really that untargeted? And does the highly interested patient have the background to know how to inject it properly, if there really is a way to target it?
Yes. The paper "pentadecapeptide BPC 157 (PL 14736) improves ligament healing in the rat" (Sikiric et al. 2010) examined BPC-157 orally and via IP injection -- there was very little difference between the two methods. And this was in an animal model where the MCL ligament, in the leg, was surgically transected.
Further, consider insulin. It's typically administered as an aqueous solution injected subcutaneously, and it's absorbed quickly and systemically, with local effects in the near-zero range.
It's possible to make an aqueous solution for SC injection that might have some degree of local efficacy, if it's injected near a target site. This, however, would involve tinkering with the PH of the solution to induce drug precipitation, post-injection, near the injection site. It's complicated, and not the sort of thing that gray market research chemists do.
Would BPC-157 be something that could be packaged in a liposome? Everything I've read about liposomal supplements has pointed to it having superior absorption, distribution and bioavailability when compared to injection
Yeah, you can incorporate BPC-157 and other small peptides into liposomes.
Liposomal delivery might even work for far larger peptides and proteins. For e.g., there has been quite a lot of research into liposomal insulin: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2226109 and others.
The thing about BPC-157 in particular is that it has, in principle, pretty good oral bioavailability, and it's not clear that it would benefit from liposomal delivery. You'd probably want to run a comparative analysis -- liposomal suspension vs. plain aqueous solution -- which would be expensive no matter how you go about it.
My doctor uncle told me how people want targeted injection even though "the stuff will spread to the whole body anyway". He says "it makes them feel good so we do it that way."
