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In September of 1988, fans of track and field events were dealt a severe blow when the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for an anabolic steroid and had to return his Olympic gold medal. Unfortunately, this was only one of many similar incidents in the history of sports. Besides the deleterious effects on athletes' health, drug use also causes disillusionment in the eye of the spectator. We are no longer inspired by athletic efforts, but reason—often from a comfortable couch—that it is not training but just the right combination of drugs that stands between us and Olympic glory. One solution to the problem of doping could be systematic controls, whereby everybody entering a competition would be tested. But current doping controls are too cost- and labor-intensive to allow for general screening.

Jing Cheng at Tsinghua University in Beijing was challenged by this bottleneck and presented a first step toward high-throughput drug testing in a recent paper in Clinical Chemistry (Du et al., 2005). Sixteen prohibited substrates were immobilized on a chip and overlaid with a mixture of antibodies specific for those targets, along with the sample to be tested. If the test sample did not contain any of the prohibited compounds, the antibodies bound their substrates on the chip and could easily be visualized. If, however, the test sample did contain a forbidden drug, antibody bound this substance before it could bind to its counterpart on the chip, and hence no signal appeared. This detection assay does not require complicated and expensive equipment, and it allows a large number of substances to be rapidly tested at the same time. But there are still a few hurdles in the way of it becoming an internationally accepted doping test. Among other factors, a specific and very sensitive antibody is needed for every prohibited substance, and Cheng is currently working on developing some of these antibodies.

With the advent of systematic and reliable screening for every athlete, doping will hopefully become a thing of the past. Ideally, we will once again be inspired by the performance of top athletes to get off the couch and prove that we are capable of something—even just remotely—similar.