Protein chips for high-throughput doping screening in athletes

Screening hybridomas for anabolic androgenic steroids by steroid analog antigen microarray

BACKGROUND

Currently, dozens of anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) are forbidden in the World Anti-Doping Agency Prohibited List, however, despite extensive investigation, there are still lots of AAS without corresponding monoclonal antibodies.

RESULTS

A steroid analog antigen microarray made up of ten AAS was fabricated to screen the hybridoma and it was found an original unsuccessful clone turned out to be a candidate anti-boldenone antibody, without any cross-reactions with endogenous AAS or 44 different AAS standard reference materials tested.

CONCLUSION

Our findings suggested that steroid analog antigen microarray could be a promising tool to screen and characterize new applications of antibodies for structure analogs, and this also exhibits the potential to fast identify effective epitopes of hybridomas in a single assay.

Up-to-Date Applications of Microarrays and Their Way to Commercialization

This review addresses up-to-date applications of Protein Microarrays. Protein Microarrays play a significant role in basic research as well as in clinical applications and are applicable in a lot of fields, e.g., DNA, proteins and small molecules. Additionally they are on the way to enter clinics in routine diagnostics. Protein Microarrays can be powerful tools to improve healthcare. An overview of basic characteristics to mediate essential knowledge of this technique is given. To reach this goal, some challenges still have to be addressed. A few applications of Protein Microarrays in a medical context are shown. Finally, an outlook, where the potential of Protein Microarrays is depicted and speculations how the future of Protein Microarrays will look like are made.

New strategies for doping control

Doping in sports is commonplace. The prevention of harm to the athlete, the guarantee of fair play, and a level playing field for all competitors are the basis of the current anti-doping strategies. As healthcare systems are forced to allocate increasing resources to prevent and treat the prevailing pathologies worldwide, funding for anti-doping campaigns will necessarily be restricted. Ideally, additional resources should be devoted to increasing the number of athletes tested, the panels of tests used, and the frequency of out-of-competition controls. Since doping prevention cannot be considered a priority for most healthcare systems, such an approach is unaffordable and an alternative framework should be devised, focused primarily on harm reduction rather than fair play. The identification of abnormal deviations from reference values, regardless of pathological or artificial causes, would allow the athlete to be followed and tested using conventional laboratory tests, which are affordable to governments and healthcare systems and available to clinical laboratories. Although this strategy would not detect cheating, it would safeguard athletes' health.