German scientists reported on Thursday they had devised a test to pinpoint a new class of drugs that, it is feared, could become a tempting choice for sports cheats.
The drugs — currently only experimental — belong to a class of medical compounds called benzothiazepines.
They are being tested in clinical trials on human volunteers to see whether they can treat irregular heartbeat, a condition called cardiac arrythmia, and have yet to be licensed.
Researchers have been surprised, though, to find that the drugs also have the unusual side effect, among lab mice, of building and sustaining muscle power.
This has prompted concerns that they could be the future drug of choice for endurance athletes.
In a study published on Thursday in a new British journal, Drug Testing and Analysis, a team led by Mario Thevis of the German Sports University in Cologne said they had established a method for detecting the molecular “fingerprint” of the two benzothiazepines in trials.
Thevis said healthy human volunteers provided samples of urine that were then spiked with the two drugs and with their metabolized components.
The telltale signature of the drugs, JTV-510 and S-107, and their breakdown products were spotted by high resolution mass spectrometry — a standard machine in a drug-testing lab — in concentrations as low as 0.1 nanograms per milliliter.
Benzothiazepines are not currently on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s list of prohibited substances, Thevis said.
However, the successful test means that, if the drugs are included on the list one day, drug cheats could be spotted early on, he said.
“If we start developing a detection method in two or three years when this drug becomes commercially available, athletes that might be tempted to misuse it will have had an opportunity for several years,” he said.
The test could be easily carried out on standard urine samples, where the trace of the drugs is likely to linger “for days, probably weeks,” Thevis said.
Benzothiazepines work on so-called calcium channels in cells in muscle fibers.
Thevis said a typical path taken by cheats was to copy a drug, such as an anabolic steroid, and then modify it slightly so that it retained the same effect, but became harder to detect. But in the case of the new test, the method looked for a “conserved” chemical signature, which cannot be modified.
New Taipei Kings guard Jeremy Lin on Friday was named the Taiwan Professional Basketball League’s (TPBL) Player of the Month, the first domestic player to win the award, while the Hsinchu Toplus Lioneers are to welcome their third head coach in less than a year. Lin averaged 22 points, 5.4 rebounds and 6.6 assists over five games in October and last month, helping the Kings to second in the standings with a 4-2 record as of Friday. The Kings last night defeated the Lioneers 96-78 to move level with the top-of-the-table Formosa Dreamers (5-2), while in the night game, the New Taipei
TO NO AVAIL: The Denver Nuggets’ Serbian center Nikola Jokic surpassed his 53-point performance in the 2023 Western Conference semi-finals against Phoenix The Washington Wizards withstood a 56-point explosion from Denver star Nikola Jokic to beat the Nuggets 122-113 on Saturday and snap their 16-game NBA losing streak. Jokic, who won his third NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) award last season, posted a career scoring high — surpassing a 53-point performance in game four of the 2023 Western Conference semi-finals against Phoenix and a 50-point regular-season best against Sacramento in 2021. The Serbian big man added 16 rebounds and eight assists, but it was all to no avail as Washington, buoyed by 39 points from Jordan Poole, won for the first time
Taiwan on Wednesday finished with 15 medals at the World Taekwondo Poomsae Championships in Hong Kong, taking home four gold, five silver and six bronze medals across the age group divisions. Taiwan ranked third on the medal table after South Korea with 17 golds and the US with eight golds at the five-day competition. “Your athletes have proven themselves as the best in the world,” World Taekwondo president Choue Chung-won said at the closing ceremony of the martial art contest that was attended by a record 1,727 athletes from around the world. On the first day of the competition at the Hong Kong
Taiwan’s Lin Cheng-jing won a bronze medal in the clean and jerk in the women’s under-49 kg division at the 2024 IWF World Weightlifting Championships in Bahrain on Saturday. Lin won her first medal at a World Weightlifting Championships for lifting 107kg in the clean and jerk in her weight class, 2kg more than Rosegie Ramos of the Philippines. However, Ramos won bronze for the combined lift after topping Lin by 5kg in the snatch. Ri Song-gum of North Korea won gold in the division’s combined lift with a total of 213kg, while Xiang Linxiang of China took silver with
RSS