Athletes using performance enhancing drugs need to be beware
Scientists at the University of Nottingham are leading the field for developing a new, improved detection system that could be used for identifying and preventing use of performance-enhancing drugs among athletes.
The research was led by Professor Colin Snape in the University’s School of Chemical, Environmental and Mining Engineering and published recently in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry and is expected to provide results that would be more reliable for detecting drug molecules in the body.
From News-Medical.Net:
However, previous techniques have been unable to offer a precise detection method. Professor Snape explained: “In effect, you are what you eat plus a little bit of what you might inject. In their natural form, however, the body’s molecules are too ‘sticky’ for accurate measurements by our laboratory equipment.”
Some methods overcome these problems but add carbon to the target molecule, irreversibly overprinting the carbon source ‘signal’. The research into hydropyrolysis, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, has developed a new approach that delicately strips molecules of their ‘sticky’ parts but retains the carbon skeleton intact, allowing easy detection of the carbon source.
The new detection system could allow scientists to pinpoint banned substances in an athlete’s system — even the new designer steroid specifically manufactured to avoid detection recently uncovered by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada).
Professor Snape added: “Our discovery of a method to produce easy to handle molecules without destroying their carbon source signal opens up the whole body’s molecules to intense scientific scrutiny.”
Professor Snape’s research group has formulated a technique known as hydropyrolysis in collaboration with Dr Mark Sephton at the Open University for recognizing the origin of any carbon-based molecules, including fatty acids and steroids, in the human body.
