Efficacy of Dopaminergic Agents in Peptic Ulcer Healing and Relapse Prevention — Further Indication of the Importance of Stomach Dopamine in the Stress Organoprotection Concept

The pharmacological properties of the novel peptide BPC 157 (PL-10)

“…Similarly, the evidence that separate benefical effects reciprocally or synergistically all together should support an overall protective effect is still intringuing. Despite some scepticism, a large range of protective effects, commonly referred to as organoprotective, involving a beneficial effect on different organ lesions, have been consistently noted after application of various agents such as PGs, dopamine agents, and somatostatin [7,37,42,43]. Could these two concepts finally be united by the essential role of the stomach (or gastrointestinal tract) and could it be shown that these substances are indeed effective mediators of the suggested organoprotective response (as could be assumed from their effectiveness when applied exogenously [7,37,42,43]), whether or not such organoprotection could be accepted as an end result of the stress response [2,7]?…”

“…Even more importantly, considering that the disturbances of these system functions (i.e. dopamine-, NO-, somatosensory neurons-system [7,[38][39][40]43]), either as over-activity or inhibition, may provide multiple lesions in different organs [7,[38][39][40]43], the reported evidence that this pentadecapeptide is able to counteract both their over-action, and their inhibition [3,9,12,13,15,17], may suggest this pentadecapeptide as a new, but most probably essential constituent of the physiological defence system that should be further investigated .…”

“…Thus, this theoretical and practical approach has been used not only in the case of the pentadecapeptide BPC 157, but has also been considered consistently for the many other agents known to be organoprotective [7,37,42,43]. Finally, considering its primary gastrointestinal origin (in human gastric juice) [2], unlike other gut peptides [ 1 ], stomach pentadecapeptide BPC 157 could be regarded as an implementation of the real activity of gut peptides.…”

“…Thus, for mucosal integrity maintenance, considering these effects coupled with its particular origin and stability, it was suggested that this pentadecapeptide, being continuously in gastric juice, may pertinently protect mucosa against lesion development [2]. Indeed, it protects the endothelium and it protects against ethanol damaging effect: it attenuates gastric lesions in vivo [6,7,18,19,32], as well as in vitro gastric cell damage [24,25], having a particular 'direct' cytoprotective effect that is not related to gastric acid secretion [11]. It has no effect on gastric acid secretion or gastrointestinal motility [2,34].…”

“…Besides this, BPC 157 was found to also inhibit other inflammatory mediators, such as MPO, TXB2 [26][27][28], in both animal and human inflamed mucosa. Pentadecapeptide BPC 157 could act locally, irrespective of the location of the inflamed part of the gastrointestinal tract; besides gastric mucosal cells [6,7,18,19,24,25,32], when applied on the site of the colon-colon anastomosis [21], it increased anastomosis healing.…”