Updated May 27, 2026 10:50AM
On April 26, 58-year-old ultramarathoner, podcaster, and bowhunting influencer Cameron “Cam” Hanes ran 2:39:11 in the Eugene Marathon, winning the masters division. The runner-up, who Hanes outkicked by only two seconds in what must have been a dramatic finish, was more than 18 years younger.
It was an impressive achievement. Not only did Hanes beat his recent best by more than 10 minutes, but he also ran the age-graded equivalent of 2:10:56.
Then the proverbial excrement hit the fan. Sage Canaday, a masters ultra, trail, and mountain runner, accused Hanes of using a banned substance called BPC-157, and filed a tip with the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), claiming that Hanes had touted his use of it on Instagram and his podcast.
Hanes didn’t dispute the charges. Rather, he doubled down. “I’m an old man,” a number of news outlets reported him as saying on his podcast. “If this s**** might work and save me from surgery, I’m going to try it. Why wouldn’t I? I don’t have USA on my jersey.”
Since then, the controversy has done nothing but escalate. What rules should, or shouldn’t, apply to masters runners? How do you distinguish a back-of-the-pack runner on a blood-pressure medication that theoretically requires a medical exemption from a competitive age-group contender seeking an advantage?
Behind these questions, however, lurks a smorgasbord of others relating to BPC-157 itself, a compound which, most likely, few runners had even heard of until it suddenly hit the news. We’ll start with the most obvious one.
What Exactly Is BPC-157?
To chemists, BPC-157 is a pentadecapeptide—a polysyllabic mouthful meaning that it is a molecule composed of 15 amino acids. That makes it a hormone-like molecule akin to insulin (51 amino acids) or the popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic or Wegovy (30 to 31 amino acids). Such molecules can bind to proteins (which contain hundreds or even thousands of amino acids), altering these proteins’ function, and therefore serving as biochemical messengers.
BPC-157 first appeared in the early 1990s, when European researchers wondered why some stomach ulcers healed quickly while others didn’t, Flynn McGuire, a physical medicine and rehabilitation resident at the University of Utah who is about to enter a sports medicine fellowship, tells Outside Run. Ultimately, McGuire says, these researchers concluded that the protective agent was a peptide naturally found in gastric juice.
From that beginning, other researchers began looking for other ways in which the ulcer-healing compound, now called Body Protection Compound 157 (a marketing bonanza for those who would later promote it as a supplement), could be applied to sports injuries, ranging from muscle and tendon tears to cartilage damage, or even stress fractures and fully broken bones.
How Does It Work?
Most likely, McGuire says, BPC-157 does several things simultaneously. One is by up-regulating a signaling protein called VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor), which encourages the growth of new capillaries. In addition, he says, it stimulates the production of nitric oxide, which assists in boosting blood flow to injured tissues.
There is also research, McGuire says, suggesting it might help preserve nerve connections with injured muscles (or muscles recovering from a hard workout).
All of this means that BPC-157 could be a really good healing and recovery aid. With one major caveat. Almost all of the published research involves animal studies. Those are useful, but there are serious limitations regarding how benefits to animals can be translated to benefits to people. Not to mention its safety.
“That’s part of the problem,” says Henry Ellis, a sports medicine surgeon and researcher at the University of Texas, Southwestern, in Dallas, Texas, who has written about BPC-157 for the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM). “We don’t know what the dangers are.”
Is It Legal?
No. Not that it’s a crime to use it, but BPC-157 is banned in Olympic sports, in and out of competition.
It’s part of a class of banned substances called “Non-Approved Substances,” a catch-all for potentially performance-enhancing drugs that aren’t approved by any government regulatory authority. In other words, these substances are potentially dangerous, possibly experimental, but tempting to athletes seeking an extra edge.
Is BPC-157 Detectable in Doping Tests?
Yes. As far back as 2016, when BPC-157 started showing up as a potential doping problem, researchers had developed a method of detecting it at part-per-trillion levels in urine. BPC-157 itself has a very short half-life in the body (as low as 30 minutes)—which, at first blush, would make it look like a doper’s dream. But it has a more stable metabolic byproduct that can serve as a marker for it and which is reportedly detectable for 48 to 72 hours.
Some studies have shown that a single dose could act as a biological “switch” that activates healing processes that then continue for months—an effect that could make it very difficult to catch. But those studies, McGuire says, don’t have a lot of evidence behind them, and if you look on Reddit or other places where people are talking about it, he says, it appears that most people are recommending repeated doses. Many websites, in fact, recommend daily injections. Thus, instead of being a doper’s dream, it should be fairly easy to catch.
Does BPC-157 Improve Performance?
Most likely, yes. Although Hanes’ breakthrough performance could have been due to an assortment of other factors (such as improved training), he did speed up his marathon time by nearly 6%—an improvement most experienced marathoners would die for.
How BPC-157 might help to achieve such results, however, is a bit uncertain. “I don’t think of this as a performance-enhancing drug in the same way as EPO or an anabolic steroid,” McGuire says. “But especially for someone who’s a masters athlete, if you get a lot of injuries while training, if it helps you treat those injuries and be able to train harder, or continue training without a dip, then it’s performance enhancing.”
Even if you’re not injured, he says, “I think it increases performance by improving recovery.”
Is It Dangerous?
The simple answer is that nobody knows. The largest human trial had only 16 test subjects, which means that if BPC-157 had, say, a 1% risk of a truly catastrophic side effect, a test like that would have a very small chance of catching it. There is also a risk that, because it promotes blood vessel generation, it might also speed the growth of tumors, if the user happens to already have one.
Meanwhile, USADA notes that multiple larger-scale clinical trials of BPC-157 were abruptly halted. “There are only two reasons to stop a clinical trial in the middle,” Bob Seevers, a former FDA reviewer, now a regulatory consultant, tells Outside Run. “One is because you ran out of money. The other is because you were seeing adverse events.” Neither is good news for BPC-157.
That’s concerning, but an even bigger problem, Seevers says, is the risk of lax quality control by the labs manufacturing it. “You don’t know what you’re putting in your body,” he says.
This is a particularly strong concern for peptides like BPC-157. Yes, there are lots of websites that sell it in pill form, but when push comes to shove, McGuire notes, most people using it for improved running performance appear to be injecting it.
That raises concerns not present with pills, Seevers says, because injectable drugs need to be sterile in order to avoid the risk of including harmful bacteria or viruses. Traditional ways of sterilizing them are via heat treatment or radiation, but those don’t work for peptides like BPC-157, because they would also destroy the peptide. Instead, Seevers says, what’s needed is a manufacturing process called “aseptic processing,” a much more difficult method that needs to be conducted under extremely well-controlled conditions.
Bottom line, how much do you want to trust an unknown, unregulated, overseas lab?
What’s the Future?
BPC-157 is not the only peptide to raise its head in today’s doping controversies. There are lots of others, with names like TB-4, TB-500, CJC-1295, ipamorelin, tesamorelin, and GHK-Cu.
“To date, all these peptides have followed similar trajectories: promising animal data with no evidence of efficacy in humans, despite extensive advertising and widespread availability of these compounds to athletes,” Ellis and colleagues wrote in their AOSSM article. “The expansion of online peptide vendors has outpaced peer-reviewed evidence.”
Meanwhile, races and anti-doping officials will have to figure out what to do about them. And in case you’re invested in the controversy over Hanes, the Eugene Marathon provided Outside Run with this statement: “The Eugene Marathon received and complied with a request from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for participant registration records. We do not have additional information about any anti-doping investigations, and defer any further questions on the matter to USADA.”