LAST LAP

Hit-Or-Miss Testing For Drugs In Athletics Has Run Its Course

COME the next Olympics in 2004, it may be possible to screen all the
athletes for drugs, not just a few picked out for random tests. A new
lab-on-a-chip detection system could test thousands of samples in hours,
probing each for dozens of illegal substances.

The system could remove the stigma and unfairness of being singled out for
testing, while the certainty of being screened should serve as a deterrent
for would-be cheats. "It would create a level playing field for everyone,"
says Roisin Molloy of Randox Laboratories, the company which developed the
Evidence system in Crumlin, County Antrim. "The athletes would love that,"
says a spokeswoman for the anti-doping team at UK Athletics, the governing
body for the sport in Britain.

The system relies on established antibody screening technology, but
Randox's scientists have adapted it for a silicon "biochip" 1 centimetre
across that tests for up to 25 drugs at once.

Antibodies that trap specific drugs and their metabolites--the by-products
of their breakdown in the body-are attached to the surface of the chip in
an array of 25 spots. So when a single urine sample is spread across the
chip, the system tests it simultaneously for all 25 substances.

A fluorescent "tag" substance is then washed over the chip. It binds to any
antibody that has captured its target, then emits light. The amount of
light given off by each spot shows how much of each substance is present.
"It means you can detect the parent compound and the metabolites
simultaneously," says Molloy.

The system is capable of carrying out tests at the rate of one per second,
so officials could test every athlete at a meeting. Molloy envisages that
it will be used as an initial screen. "They'd have to do confirmatory
analyses on any suspect results," she says.

At present, the biochip includes common drugs of abuse in sport such as the
anabolic steroids nortestosterone and trenbolone, but Randox is
experimenting with others.

David Cowan, director of the Drug Control Centre at King's College, London,
which is accredited by the International Olympic Committee, says such a
system would "greatly assist" in pre-screening. "It would be exciting if we
could test the whole field for the full range of substances," he says.

The tests will have to be reliable. "What's critical would be false
positives," says Michele Verroken, head of the anti-doping programme at the
government-funded body UK Sport. "If we get it wrong, we'd be sued off the
planet."

Sample collection could also be a problem, says the UK Athletics
spokeswoman, as nerves can make it difficult for athletes to urinate on
demand. The best solution, she says, would be to develop chips that analyse
saliva, which is easier to collect. Molloy says that Randox is working on this.

The company will present its biochip system next month at the annual
conference of the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences in
Newport, Gwent.