Jan 27 2009
The Complicated and Expensive Process of Anti-Doping
Anti-doping laboratory equipment is big business especially in the Olympics. Anabolic steroid testing is a complicated process and can be rather expensive. This is the reason why full-scale steroid testing could not be done in schools and government agencies such as the police department, because testing costs too much per individual and can thus be done only randomly. In the last Olympics in Beijing, the China Anti-Doping Agency (CADA) spent more than $10 million dollars to create a state-of-the-art testing laboratory, taking a total of took six years to build.
A quarter of that budget, about $2.7 million, was used to purchase various laboratory testing instruments from various laboratory equipment manufacturers. Some of the primary beneficiaries of the purchases included Agilent Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Phenomenex.
Vice President of Strategic Marketing at Thermo Fisher, Stuart P. Cram, said that their company provided a number of service engineers during the Beijing Olympics who were available 24 hours a day to efficiently maintain the operation of Thermo Fisher testing equipment.
Some of the Thermo Fisher products purchased by the China Anti-Doping Agency (CADA) included triple-quadrupole TSQ Quantum Access liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry systems, DFS Sector Field gas chromatography/mass spectrometry systems, riple-quadrupole TSQ Quantum Access liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry systems, and Delta V isotope ratio mass spectrometer.
They conducted approximately 4,500 drug tests in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, analyzing samples for over 400 different drugs included in the WADA list of banned substances. The drugs were classified in nine categories of performance enhancing drugs which included anabolic steroids, hormone antagonists and modulators, hormones, beta-2 agonists, stimulants, diuretics, cannabinoids, narcotics, and glucocorticosteroids. In the drug testing process, the sample goes through every piece of testing equipment, which provides a unique function.
Once the sample enters the testing laboratory, the first stop is the Agilent 7890A gas chromatograph. The function of which is to isolate and identify the various components of the sample, detecting the named substances from the biological or natural molecules. The sample is then vaporized using heat and the vapor enters the chromatograph’s separation column. The vapor travels through the column at different speeds depending on the atomic weights of its components; the lighter ones move faster and get out of the column first.
The investigators measure the amount, speed, and sequence of the components to identify most of the banned substances. However, it is not that simple. Some compounds on the banned list, such as peptide hormones, are destroyed during the process of vaporization. With these compounds, a liquid chromatograph is required, thus the Agilent 1200 series liquid chromatograph is used.
One out of four samples is analyzed using the liquid chromatography while the rest are analyzed using gas chromatography. However, the use of liquid chromatography is increasing because of the increasing sophistication of designer drugs which contain compounds that are destroyed by the process of vaporization. Once there is a questionable substance identified in either gas- or liquid-chromatograph, the sample goes to the mass spectrometer to confirm the identity of the compound.
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