A powerful tool, capable of creating hundreds of undetectable, designer steroids in a short span of time is threatening the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the sports world. The pharmaceutical drug companies are currently using this technology and it won’t be long until designer steroid companies and chemists will utilize this same technology to create new designer steroids in minutes. Jason Thomas, graduate student from the City University in New York, in his research under the synthetic organic chemistry doctorate program, describes this powerful tool and cautions regarding its dangerous potential.

The technology, called Dynamic Combinational Chemistry (DCC), can potentially synthesize or simulate hundreds of new designer steroids. Steroid designers merely have to identify the desired features and biological activity for the drug design and the tool can synthesize the drug in minutes.

In “Designer Steroids: Speeding Evolution (and Filling Stadium Seats),” Thomas explains that attempts in the past to change the anabolic, estrogen, and androgenic properties of testosterone have been relatively slow because it has been done one at a time since there were no technologies available to do them simultaneously. Before, what a designer steroid does is to imagine a certain compound, synthesize it and then test its effectiveness.

This process can take weeks, some, even years. However, with the Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry tool, steroid chemists can synthesize and test hundreds of new steroid compounds in a matter of minutes. Of course, they still have to invest time to figure out a chemical strategy for DCC. Once they do, everything will be as easy as cooking popcorn in a microwave. The whole process is orchestrated by computers as how pharmaceutical companies are currently employing the system.

The four ring carbon structure of steroids is very complicated to create thus synthetic chemists used to create most steroidal compound from a steroidal substance called ‘diosgenin,’ which naturally occurred in the Mexican wild yam. Because of the four-ring carbon structure, the number of undetectable designer steroids that rogue chemists could synthesize was rather limited.

Combinatorial chemistry can change all that, however. There is a new way to make the molecule and the steroid chemists will no longer be limited by its structure. They started with diosgenin and moved on to progesterone and on to different types of anabolic steroids. But they could only do so much due to the limited structure. In the near future, scientists would be able to put all these things together and create something such as pure testosterone but without the unwanted side effects. But for the moment, as long as they are using diosgenin as the initial compound, this won’t be possible.

Thomas further predicts that in the future, instead of making 50 different molecules, scientists will be able to make 50 million different combinations and it will be like evolution all over again. Patrick Arnold, steroid chemist of Ergopharm and part of the BALCO steroid scandal, says that this is the method that pharmaceutical companies are employing to create a new class of steroids called Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs). These are technically not steroids but potentially have major performance-enhancing effects.

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