Bengaluru's peptide party is like a deleted scene from The Substance

Elisabeth Sparkle, the fading star Demi Moore plays in Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 film The Substance, receives a glowing vial and a single instruction. Activate the substance. She asks it nothing else, not what it is, not what it will cost her later. The two hours that follow exist mainly to punish her for the order in which she asked, or failed to ask, her questions.

Bengaluru, on one evening in late August, tried on the same scene for size. No studio, no special effects, just Koramangala and a whisper travelling through it about an invite-only gathering called a peptide party.

Fifty places were on offer against more than 200 applications. The menu ran on compounds called BPC-157 and TB-500, most of them unapproved for human use anywhere on earth. Then a letter arrived from Karnataka’s Food Safety and Drug Administration, carrying a question so unglamorous it stopped the whole evening before a single vial could be opened. What, precisely, is in this? And how do you know?

I have spent my engineering years on the plain-Jane side of exactly that question. So let me walk you through what happened. The comedy here was never that people wanted to feel young again, a desire as old as mirrors themselves. The comedy lies in what they were willing to skip to feel it a little sooner.

The scarcity, you should know, was never an accident. Fifty places against more than 200 requests, a flyer moving only through encrypted chats, threading through the city like a good rumour, one that demands a dress code before it will even reveal itself. This is not how medicine gets distributed.

It is precisely how belonging gets distributed, and belonging, considered purely as chemistry, may be the oldest performance enhancer we have ever made.

Secret society parties have always existed, or at least been imagined, the sort cinema keeps returning to precisely because the fantasy of a locked door and a coded invitation never quite goes out of fashion. An encrypted invitation and a strict headcount turned an evening about unapproved molecules into a status symbol before a single vial was opened. (Photo: Arun Uniyal/India Today)

Stanley Kubrick built an entire film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), around a masked ritual nobody was meant to see. Late Night with the Devil (2023) built one around a broadcast that summoned something it could not control.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) built one around a coven hiding in plain sight, behind the friendliest doors in the building. Old Hollywood held its own real version of the fantasy too, gatherings behind gates where the only real question was who had made the guest list, since simply being invited proved you belonged.

Somewhere along the way, that changed. Being on the guest list stopped being the prize. Now the prize is what gets injected into you once you are inside, and hardly anyone seems to notice these are two completely different kinds of exclusivity. The old parties guarded a name. This one guards a batch number. The velvet rope is still there. It has just moved from the door to the syringe.WHAT A PEPTIDE ACTUALLY IS, SINCE THE PARTY DECLINED TO SAY

Let me perform the one small duty the hosts conspicuously skipped, and define the word doing all the persuading on the invitation.

A peptide is not exotic. It is simply a short chain of amino acids, the same modest building blocks that make up every protein in your body. A peptide is simply a short chain of amino acids, the same category insulin belongs to; the word alone says nothing about whether a specific product is safe. (Photo: Arun Uniyal/India Today)

Insulin is a peptide, as are several of the most successful medicines of the last decade, now advertised on billboards for entirely different ailments. The word peptide itself passes no judgement on safety. It describes a shape, not a character reference.

The evening was actually selling something bigger than a peptide. It was selling the leap from “this is a peptide” to “this exact peptide, at this dose, given this way, is safe for a human being.” That leap is not small. It is the entire discipline of pharmacology, quietly served on a silver tray, right next to the canapes.THE SCIENCE THE EVENING TRIED TO WALK PAST

Take BPC-157 first, the compound spoken of that night in the reverent hush a sommelier reserves for a rare vintage.

A systematic review published in 2025 in the HSS Journal went looking for proof, and found 36 studies worth counting. Thirty-five of these were animals in cages, or cells sitting quietly in a dish. Only one was human, and even that lone study, a small chart review rather than a real trial, left the reviewers unable to say anything firm about safety.

A single, tiny, two-person pilot trial since then has not moved that arithmetic an inch. America’s own drug regulator has separately flagged the compound for thin safety data, and for real worries about immune reactions and impurities in how it is actually made.

TB-500 deserves a fairer look, because it is not quite the same as BPC-157, and treating them as identical would be its own kind of lying. A 2025 review found just one human clinical study of BPC-157 against 35 animal studies, nowhere near enough to establish safety. (Photo: Vashu Sharma/India Today)

Under its proper name, thymosin beta-4, it has genuinely been given to humans in a controlled trial of 40 healthy volunteers, injected into a vein, and it was well tolerated, with only mild, short-lived side effects.

But a trial like that studies one exact product, made to a precise standard, at a measured dose, watched over by someone whose whole job is to notice if something goes wrong. It says nothing about whatever sits, unlabelled, in a vial in a Koramangala flat. And it certainly makes no promise about the long list of wellness claims that hung upon it, like ornaments on a tree that never actually grew them.

Somewhere between those two compounds sits the honest shape of the whole field. Animals respond beautifully. Humans remain largely untested. And in the space between those two sentences, the grey market has quietly pitched its tent.

None of this is reason to fear peptides themselves. It is the only reason to distrust any evening that hands you a conclusion, dressed up and confident, from an experiment nobody actually ran.THE VOCABULARY DID MOST OF THE MEDICAL WORK

Wellness marketing has its own dictionary, and it rarely uses the word drug. It prefers softer words: protocol, compound, optimisation, and recovery. These words borrow the tone of medicine without doing medicine’s actual work.

Real regulatory language, the kind FSSAI itself uses when reviewing a health product, asks for something blunter: composition, dosage, clinical evidence, and manufacturing licence. That is precisely the vocabulary an evening built on unapproved peptides could not produce when asked. Terms like protocol and optimisation borrow the authority of clinical medicine while skipping the evidence clinical medicine actually requires. (Photo: Vashu Sharma/India Today)

Picture a man holding a syringe up to the light, talking about his health the way a doctor might talk about a patient’s chart. He is not lying, exactly. He has simply borrowed the tone of a hospital, without any of its actual safeguards.

No ethics committee is watching. No one has signed a consent form. No one nearby is trained for what happens if something goes wrong. Speak with enough confidence, and you can sound like an expert even when you are not one.THE OLDER PARTY THE NEW ONE IS QUIETLY COPYING

None of this, in truth, is especially new, and that is precisely what lifts it from spectacle into satire.

Hollywood has spent the better part of a century teaching anyone who stands in front of a camera a single, unforgiving lesson: ageing is a failure awaiting correction, not a fact of being alive.

The red carpet does not forgive a face that looks its age. It demands, politely but without much mercy, that the face appear both younger and entirely untouched in the achieving of it. From Hollywood's red carpet to Silicon Valley's biohacking scene, the same old promise, that ageing is a failure to be corrected, keeps arriving in a newer coat. (Photo: Arun Uniyal/India Today)

That contradiction has spawned an economy of its own, procedures and injectables, supplements dressed in the packaging of skincare while nursing the ambitions of a pharmaceutical. Names are borrowed from minor deities, Hygieia, Panacea, Iaso, each one whispering the same old promise in a newer coat. You need not keep the body you were given.

Silicon Valley took that identical promise and filed it under a different department. Where Hollywood called it beauty, the biohacking crowd calls it optimisation, a word that quietly reclassifies the desire to look 30 forever as a software update rather than a vanity.

It may be the most elegant piece of marketing the enterprise has ever produced.WHAT THE INSPECTOR ACTUALLY ASKED FOR

And so, briefly, to the least glamorous people in this whole story, who turned out to be the only ones asking the correct question all evening.

When Karnataka’s regulators wrote to the organisers, the request was almost disappointing in its modesty. They wanted the composition of what was actually on offer, the manufacturer, the regulatory status, the intended dose and its purpose. They wanted to know whether any doctor, consent form or emergency plan existed should something go wrong while the syringes were still warm.

That is not bureaucratic theatre. It is the entire discipline of pharmacology, reduced to a checklist, a checklist that an evening built on injecting strangers with unapproved compounds could not fill in. That failure tells you everything the guest list was quietly designed to distract from.

The party was cancelled before it ever began. I would love to end the story there, imagining a clipboard-carrying inspector standing victorious over an abandoned tray of champagne. But satire earns nothing by choosing the easy ending. The truth, as it turns out, is messier. Regulators wanted the composition, manufacturer, dosage and medical safeguards behind what was being offered, a checklist the party could not answer. (Photo: Arun Uniyal/India Today)

Within minutes, a message went out. The shutdown, it said, proved nothing except that old institutions fear what they cannot control. A smaller gathering was already forming, quieter this time, in a private flat across town. Within half a minute, several dozen people had said yes.

That, I think, is the real joke, sharper than any line about syringes or linen shirts. This culture was not built by accident. For decades, we were taught that an ageing body is a failure, a mistake waiting to be corrected, rather than simply what it means to be alive.

So perhaps we should not be surprised that the same culture eventually threw a party at which nobody thought to ask the one question that used to come first, before every other question.

Every vial makes the same promise The Substance made. Activate it, and ask nothing else. Bengaluru, on one August evening, almost said yes.- Ends

Radifah Kabir tries to make the universe slightly less mysterious as Senior Sub-Editor at India Today’s Science Desk. A lifelong lover of physics and mathematics, she has spent four years (and counting) translating complex physics papers into English, chasing scientists for interviews, and writing explainers that don’t put readers to sleep. Off-duty, her heart belongs to Lana Del Rey's melodies, Quentin Tarantino's films, poetry, the Star Wars universe, good English movies, series and books, and one very demanding cat.