Steroids and other forms of illegal substance abuse are 1000 times easier to detect in athletes thanks to a new highly sensitive technology created by Chimera Biotec and German Sports University.
Sponsored by the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal, the Imperacer technology produces a 1000-fold increase in sensitivity for detecting specific proteins or other substances.
The introduction of Imperacer comes at crucial time - not only for professional sports such as baseball and cycling, but also for high school athletic programmes.
According to a survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, steroid use among high school students more than doubled between 1991 and 2003.
In fact, more than 6 percent of the 15,000 students surveyed admitted to trying steroid injections or pills.
"Imperacer is an extremely powerful tool for doping tests in that it can trace even small samples of drugs within the myostatin protein," said Michael Adler, director of research and development at Chimera Biotec.
The myostatin protein belongs to the family of growth hormones and has significant influence on the skeletal muscles.
Blocking signal transductions of myostatins causes an immense growth of muscles.
Myostatin levels can be altered by using drugs, which influence the signal transduction of myostatins directly, and by influencing genes, which regulate the myostatin level (referred to as gene doping).
Along with Adler, researchers at Chimera develop ultra sensitive tests for the detection of myostatin doping alongside the German Sports University of Cologne, Germany and its director of endocrinology and molecular muscle physiology, Patrick Diel.
"Drug tracing concentrates on certain metabolism and myostatin is certainly the direct focus," said Diel.
"Regulation mechanisms of this hormone must be analysed in detail.
"Chimera's Imperacer allows testers to determine the metabolism in athletes in correlation to physiological exposure to drugs."
