Potential detection system for performance enhancing drugs

A potential detection system that can be used to test athletes for performance enhancing drugs is currently under the development stage by scientists at the University of Nottingham.

The research is considered to provide a more reliable way of detecting drug molecules in the body.

From News-medical.net:

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."

The research is 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.