In what may prove to be a significant advance in the campaign against sports doping, City of Hope researchers have developed a new method of detecting performance-enhancing anabolic steroids, including so-called "designer steroids" that may escape current testing methods.
Authorities have long based their efforts to find evidence of doping through chemistry, with labs searching an athlete's blood or urine for chemical compounds known to enhance performance. But designer steroids such as THG -- the substance at the center of the BALCO doping scandal -- are crafted to be invisible because authorities don't know to look for its particular chemical markers.
The new strategy moves away from chemistry -- to biology. And, according to experts, the City of Hope research is at the leading edge of a wave of biology-based testing advancements that may one day show testers if genes have been manipulated for athletic exploits.
All anabolic steroids, researchers have learned, function by interacting with an internal switch at the cellular level called an "androgen receptor." The new test detects any compound that turns on that receptor, even if the compound is unfamiliar to anti-doping authorities. A "eureka moment," Dr. Barry Forman, an expert in genetics who led the research on receptors, said of adapting it for the anti-doping campaign.
Results of the new testing strategy were published in the Oct. 21 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Nuclear Receptor Signaling. The non-profit City of Hope, based in Duarte, is widely considered a leading medical research and treatment center. A post-doctoral fellow, Xiaohui Yuan, performed many of the experiments in Forman's lab.
Researchers and doping experts say the need for new strategies is keen. The BALCO case showed how easy it is to tweak a molecule or two in a known steroid and come up with a new one, THG; testers knew nothing about it until a track coach sent in a sample.
As BALCO defendant Victor Conte put it last month upon being sentenced in federal court in San Francisco to eight months' confinement: "Even the so-called gold-standard anti-doping programs designed for Olympic-caliber athletes are ineffective, let alone the more inept programs that exist in professional sports."
And, as the journal article describing Forman's research put it, "The full extent of the current problem [of sports-related doping] is not fully known because the only designer compounds that can be identified are those where there was a 'whistle-blower' who alerted authorities."
