Pentadecapeptide BPC 157 Shortens Duration of Tetracaine- and Oxybuprocaine-Induced Corneal Anesthesia in Rats

This is a single rodent study from the laboratory that has published the bulk of the world's BPC-157 literature — the same provenance caveat that attaches to the Krivić 2006 Achilles paper, the Klicek 2008 fistula paper, and the Sikirić 2018 vascular review. No unaffiliated laboratory has reproduced the corneal-anesthesia reversal finding in the five years since publication, and the absence is information.

The model — topical anesthetic toxicity in rat cornea — is mechanistically tractable but clinically narrow. Topical tetracaine and oxybuprocaine are short-acting agents whose ophthalmic use is brief and supervised; the toxicity profile that would justify an "antidote" mostly emerges with self-medicated repeated dosing, which is not the experimental scenario tested. The mechanism inference — that BPC 157 acts within the NO system — rests on the L-NAME and L-arginine dissociation patterns, which is consistent with the group's broader framework but cannot adjudicate alone whether NO modulation is the causal mechanism or a downstream marker.

The publication venue is regional: Acta Clinica Croatica is PubMed-indexed but lower-citation than the World Journal of Gastroenterology, Inflammopharmacology, or Current Pharmaceutical Design venues where the group's higher-profile work appears. The Croatian-language version on Hrčak and the English version share authorship and content; the bilingual publication pattern is a feature of the Croatian medical literature, not a hidden translation gap. The translated-literature framing reflects the original Croatian-language availability, not that the English version is itself an after-the-fact translation.

Per the no-human-RCTs critic response, BPC-157 sits in the corpus's rodent-only evidence tier: hundreds of small-animal experiments produced by a single laboratory program over three decades, with a 2018 Phase I/II pipeline reference that has not produced published Phase II efficacy data since. The corneal-anesthesia reversal sits at the suggestive end of that tier — a tightly controlled mechanism finding in a small tissue compartment, useful for narrowing the NO-system hypothesis, not useful as direct evidence for clinical ophthalmic indication.