Try This – 3 big shares for the week

This week I’m sharing some cutting-edge research on Alzheimer’s, peptides and cancer, and the shady reason some lawyers are against self-driving cars. 

Let’s dive in.

Number 1: Could BPC-157 Fuel Cancer?

An FDA advisory committee just voted to ease restrictions on several popular peptides, including BPC-157. And if you spend any time online, you know how that conversation goes. Half the internet says peptides are the greatest thing to ever happen to human healing. The other half says you're going to give yourself cancer.

So which is it?

The Bioavailable YouTube channel did a careful breakdown, and the smartest thing it does is pull apart three questions that people tend to mash together. 

Does BPC-157 cause cancer by damaging healthy DNA?
Does it promote cancer by helping already-damaged cells multiply? 
Or does it feed cancer by building the blood supply a tumor needs to grow?

Three different questions. Three different answers.

On causing cancer, the evidence is thin. Repair peptides don't appear to damage DNA in the first place.

On promoting and feeding it, the concern is real, and it comes down to one process. A tumor can only grow to about 1 to 2 millimeters, roughly the size of a pinhead, before the cells in its center start starving. To get any bigger, it has to recruit its own blood vessels. That process is called angiogenesis, and it's the bottleneck. No new vessels, no growth.

Here's the problem: Building new blood vessels is also how BPC-157 heals tissue. Same tool, different job.

Now, here’s a little background info on why there’s concern: When doctors perform autopsies on people who died of something unrelated—a car accident, a heart attack—they routinely find tiny tumors sitting in the prostate, the thyroid, the breast. The person had no idea it was there. And in most cases it never would have caused them a single problem.

Why not? Because it stayed too small to matter. A tumor that can't get its own blood supply stays stuck at about the size of a pinhead. It's alive, but it's starving, and it isn't going anywhere.

Now put those two facts together. Those quiet little tumors stay quiet because nothing is feeding them, and what keeps them starved is the absence of a blood supply. BPC-157's whole job is to build blood supply.

Nobody has shown that it wakes anything up. But you can see why the question is worth asking.

The counterargument comes from the lab that originally discovered BPC-157. Their claim is that it just doesn't switch angiogenesis on. It reads the situation, builds vessels where tissue needs repair, and shuts them down where the growth is abnormal. This claim is coming from a rat cornea study, and it's a genuinely interesting result. It's also one lab defending its own compound, and the only cancer-specific support they offer is a conference abstract.

All of this research is preclinical. Cell dishes and animals. Nobody has run the long-term human study, in either direction.

So here's the line I'd underline: no evidence of harm is not the same as evidence of no harm. We have the first. We don't have the second.

Where I've landed: I've been cycling on and off BPC-157 for about two years with my functional medicine doctor, mostly for gut health and joints. My N of 1 has been positive. I looked at what we know and what we don't, and decided it's worth it for me. A personal history of cancer would change my calculus completely. My mom is a breast cancer survivor, and even though she's been in remission for many years now, I'd be concerned about her taking it.

And as I always say, I might look like a doctor because I'm Indian, but I'm definitely not one. This is not medical advice, lol.

Number 2: Inhaling high-dose CO2 clears Alzheimer’s proteins from the brain?

Could inhaling CO₂ help clear Alzheimer's proteins from the brain?

That reads like something from a sketchy corner of the internet. It ran in New Scientist this week. It's paywalled, so here's the breakdown.

First, the system involved. Your brain has a waste disposal network called the glymphatic system, channels running alongside your blood vessels that flush out cellular garbage. It runs hardest during deep sleep, when slow brain waves drive your vessels to dilate and constrict about once every 30 seconds. That rhythmic squeeze is a pump. It's how the trash goes out.

So a team at the University of New Mexico asked a good question. Could you run that pump while someone is awake?

Their tool was carbon dioxide. Breathing elevated CO₂ makes blood vessels dilate, because your body works harder to flush the gas and push oxygen to your tissues. So they built a mask that alternated between ordinary air at 0.05% CO₂, which is what you're breathing right now, and air at 5%. Switching every 35 seconds, for half an hour.

It worked. Brain vessels started pumping the way they do in deep sleep.

Second, the result. Fifteen minutes later, beta-amyloid in participants' blood had risen. In every single person. Amyloid climbing in the blood means it's leaving the brain. Tau cleared too, but only in those already showing cognitive decline, likely because they had more to move.

Mechanistically, this is super exciting, and I sent it to a few friends of mine who are in this field. The read was that it's promising research. But we need to remind ourselves that this was a pilot study of twelve people. And about an hour after the session ended, the clearance drifted back to baseline.

So we have proof you can move the needle. Not proof it helps.

Here's why I'm sharing it anyway.

Almost everything we've tried in Alzheimer's works by going into the brain and pulling the buildup out. This is the opposite. It's turning up a cleaning system your body already runs on its own, every night, for free.

And that system isn't picky. It clears amyloid, tau, and other junk alike, so if this holds up, the implications run well past Alzheimer's. A 2025 study already pointed at Parkinson's.

The team wants to build a portable version of this mask you could use at home. Until then, the lead researcher was emphatic: don't try this yourself. High-concentration CO₂ outside of a monitored setting can be life-threatening.

Number 3: Why Some Lawyers Are Fighting Self-Driving Cars

Roughly 40,000 Americans die in car crashes every year. It's part of why we live about three years less than people in comparable countries, because those deaths disproportionately affect young people.

In fact, about 10% of the life expectancy shortfall is from vehicular accidents.

Then I read the above post on my X timeline….

Paul Graham posted that trial lawyers have spent nearly a decade lobbying against self-driving cars. His read on why: they need people getting hurt, because that's what lawsuits are made of.

Apparently, the trial lawyers' lobby has fought autonomous vehicle legislation for years, and they say it's all about protecting victims' right to sue. But American auto insurance companies pay out $180 to $220 billion a year, a lot of that going to law firms.

I'm not sharing this because it's a sad story about lawyers. I'm sharing it because AI is getting hammered from every direction. But this is the other side of the ledger. Waymo has driven over 220 million miles with nobody behind the wheel and has had 90% fewer serious injury crashes than human drivers on the same roads.

If that costs the trial lawyers some business, so be it.

See you next week for more shares. 

Much love,
Dhru Purohit

The information in this newsletter is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice; please consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any health-related decisions.