LETTER
doi:10.1016/mthe.2005.2513
TO THE
EDITOR
The Need for Antidoping Research Adam Cawley Australian Sports Drug Testing Laboratory, National Measurements Institute, Pymble, NSW 2073 and School of Chemistry, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
[email protected]
S I
ir,
read your recent editorial Doping, Gene Transfer and Sport [1] with interest and would like to take this opportunity to discuss the issues raised further. I agree with your point relating to the use of elite athletes in ambassadorial roles to discourage the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport. In Australia, we are fortunate to have past and present Olympic champions such as Susie O’Neill and Ian Thorpe encourage young athletes to “play fair” and maintain a healthy lifestyle. It is vital that we educate the men and women of sport through the ranks from the junior levels to the elite about the dangers of doping—prevention is better than cure. The importance of such programs has been further emphasized by reports that show progression from the use of anabolic steroids to the abuse of other illicit drugs [2,3]. The second critical component of doping control is represented by the development of more sophisticated methods of detection. Antidoping testing and research is complementary to education, as it represents a deterrent for those who would otherwise seek to gain an unfair advantage in competition and expose themselves to potentially lifethreatening situations. I disagree with the assertion that “the providers will always be ahead of the game.” In fact, antidoping scientists have closed the gap considerably between themselves and the cheaters in the past five years. For instance, in response to the foreseeable problem of hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier (HBOC) abuse, the doping control community has developed methods of detection before completion of worldwide clinical trials examining the therapeutic benefits of these compounds [4,5]. These developments have followed successful research aimed at detecting erythropoietin (EPO) abuse [6-8], an accomplishment regarded by many as impossible less than a decade ago. Furthermore, initial research to detect human growth hormone (hGH) abuse [9] and gene doping [10], other so-called undetectable practices, has recently proven promising. Consideration should be given to the complementary nature of the work carried out in the areas of doping control and medical research. The past decade has seen doping control laboratories contribute to improvements in steroid hormone profiling techniques used for medical diagnosis
MOLECULAR THERAPY Vol. 11, No. 2, February 2005 Copyright © The American Society of Gene Therapy
[11,12]. More recently, as the nature of antidoping research has evolved from the applied chemistry of stimulant and steroid detection into the biology of EPO, hGH and genes, strong ties to the medical research community have become essential. The value of these collaborations cannot be underestimated, for it is conceivable that future advances in detection capabilities such as the use of surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (SELDI-MS) [13] to detect markers of peptide hormone abuse may also provide the means to characterize malignant tumors. Antidoping scientists would welcome further discussion relating to the allocation and use of the limited resources we have worldwide. Considering the public health benefits that antidoping research may provide in the future, however, I believe that it is premature to suggest that it is of little significance.
REFERENCES 1. Verma, I. M. (2004). Doping, Gene Transfer and Sport. Mol. Ther. 10: 405. 2. DuRant, R. H. et al. (1993). Use of multiple drugs among adolescents who use anabolic steroids. N. Engl. J. Med. 328: 922-926. 3. Yesalis, C. E. et al. (1993). Anabolic-androgenic steroid use in the United States. JAMA 270: 1217-1221. 4. Trout, G. J. et al. (2003). Developments in sports drug testing. Aust. J. Chem. 56: 175-180. 5. Lasne, F. et al. (2004). Detection of hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers in human serum for doping analysis: screening by electrophoresis. Clin. Chem. 50: 410-415. 6. Lasne, F. and de Ceaurriz, J. (2000). Recombinant erythropoietin in urine. Nature 405: 635. 7. Parisotto, R. et al. (2001). Detection of recombinant human erythropoietin abuse in athletes utilizing markers of altered erythropoiesis. Haematologica 86: 128-137. 8. Lasne, F. et al. (2002). Detection of isoelectric profiles of erythropoietin in urine: differentiation of natural and administered recombinant hormones. Anal. Biochem. 311: 119-126. 9. Wallace, J. D. et al. (1999). Responses of the Growth Hormone (GH) and Insulin-like Growth Factor axis to exercise, GH administration, and GH withdrawal in trained adult males: A potential test for GH abuse in sport. J. Clin. Endocrinol. Metab. 84: 3591-3601. 10. Lasne, F. et al. (2004). “Genetic doping” with erythropoietin cDNA in primate muscle is detectable. Mol. Ther. 10: 409-410. 11. Catlin, D. H., Hatton, C. K., and Starcevic, S. H. (1997). Issues in detecting abuse of xenobiotic anabolic steroids and testosterone by analysis of athletes’ urine. Clin. Chem. 43: 1280-1288. 12. Flenker, U. et al. (1997). Detection and classification of different male steroid profiles by means of multivariate statistics. In Recent advances in doping control (4) (W. Schänzer, H. Geyer, A. Gotzmann and U. Mareck-Engelke, Eds.), pp. 203-210. SPORT und BUCH Straub, Cologne. 13. Bischoff, R. and Luider, T. M. (2004). Methodological advances in the discovery of protein and peptide disease markers. J. Chromatogr. B. 803: 27-40.
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