One type of doping in sport could be a thing of the past when a new approach developed at the University of Dundee is implemented across the sporting world. Researchers have found that they are able to distinguish natural testosterone from pharmaceutically manufactured testosterone which is abused by some athletes to build muscle for strength and speed.
Professor Mike Rennie in the School of Life Sciences believes that this will be a show-stopper for people who abuse testosterone. He explains his new method: "It is relatively easy to detect synthetic anabolic steroids, which have been used for years by cheating athletes to increase their muscle bulk - all that is needed is a small urine sample and a relatively simple piece of analytical equipment, a gas chromatograph. The cheats and their advisors realised this and started to use testosterone in the chemical form it is found in the body." They expected that it would act identically to the normal hormone and also because it is so similar to the natural substance that it would impossible for drug testers to tell the two apart, letting the extra dope they take go undetected.
Unfortunately for them however, the testosterone they take is made by pharmaceutical companies from plant steroids - the same steroids used to make the birth control pill - and plants and animals have very different ways of making steroids. Both set of steroids are marked with a distinctive "signature". We are developing a method, using a very sensitive mass spectrometer, which can distinguish between the natural signatures carried by the carbon and hydrogen atoms in normal bodily testosterone and the testosterone which is made from plant material."
Professor Michael Rennie and colleagues realised that there was a gap in the war chest of drug testers trying to detect athletes who cheat by using testosterone rather than artificial anabolic steroids and looked for support to develop the new method. WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, which was created by the International Olympic Committee in November 1999 to promote drug-free sport has awarded a substantial grant of US $175k to him mand his team in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee.
Professor Rennie leads a small group of researchers whose main interests are in metabolism which they investigate using a variety of stable-isotope tracer techniques based upon mass spectrometry to make measurements of how fast muscles grow, the effects of exercise and protein in the diet on muscle mass, rates of bone metabolism and the effects of ageing on these. The group is supported by grants from the Medical Research Council, Natural Environmental Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and, recently, The Wellcome Trust. Professor Rennie has published over 200 papers on human metabolism in the last 25 years.
Contact Professor Mike Rennie 01382 344572
By Jenny Marra, Head of Press 01382 344910 j.m.marra@dundee.ac.uk