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David Cowan’s laboratory gets through 650 litres of urine
every year |
David Cowan is a pharmacist who has been preparing for the Olympics.
His drug testing laboratory at King’s College London is where the
bulk of Britain’s Olympic team will have been screened before they
went to Athens, for anabolic steroids, amphetamines, protein hormones,
epitestosterone, darbopoetin and up to 500 other controlled substances
that could illegally boost their medal chances. It may sound glamorous,
but Dr Cowan’s laboratory gets through about 650 litres of urine
every year.
Experts like Dr Cowan are facing unprecedented challenges. The Athens
games is the first major event since the THG (tetrahydrogestrinone) designer
steroid scandal rocked athletics and saw British sprinter Dwain Chambers
banned. The scientists have been forced to accept an unpalatable truth:
their most dangerous opponents are now their own kind — rogue chemists
specifically designing drugs to slip past the tests.
Crazy scientific minds
“That was new for me because I was working on the basis that no
sensible athlete would take a drug that hadn’t gone through the
proper testing,” Dr
Cowan says. “I was wrong. They’re prepared to take substances
of unknown toxicity, and that’s scary. It is also a bit uncomfortable
that there is clearly some connivance. There are some crazy scientific
minds there probably just making money out of designing things to beat
the tests.”
Conventional thinking says the pressure and rewards in modern sport mean
there is a greater incentive than ever before for athletes to cheat.
It also says that the dopers have become so sophisticated that the drug
detectives trying to catch them are constantly one step behind. “I’m
not in total agreement with that,” Dr Cowan says. “Is there
more pressure to cheat? Our testing has improved over the years so it
is a bit of a balance between the two I’d say.” In some cases,
he says, the anti-dopers are ahead of the field: tests have already been
developed for several new substances not yet abused in sport.
Early tests for drugs in sport were designed to detect amphetamines.
They were developed by the British chemist Arnold Beckett, whom Dr Cowan — an
expert in drug metabolism — began working with in the mid-1970s. “As
a naive academic I said, ‘Look we can’t just occasionally
get samples from sport, because it disrupts the research. We need to
do it properly’,” Dr Cowan says.
Screens to find anabolic steroids followed, and in 1985 the Kings’ College
operation became one of a handful in the world to be accredited by the
International Olympic Committee.
Dr Cowan has interests away from sport. He is regularly involved in criminal
cases as a forensic toxicologist and his research group is one of a few
in the world granted a licence to test the effects of “ecstasy” on
human subjects. Neatly for a chemist, he crystallises much of his academic
interest to one simple question: “If we find a sample of drug in
your body we have two important unknowns: how much did you take and when
did you take it.” The answer lies within a mass spectrometer — the
tool of trade for the serious drug hunter. The King’s sports laboratory
has banks of them, sitting side by side and quietly hunting their way
through a check list of banned drugs in dozens of samples each day.
Some sports allow substances that others have banned. (Swimmers, for
instance, may take some stimulants that high board divers may not.) This
means that, although the testers do not know the identity of the person
who supplied the sample, they are told the discipline in which he or
she competes.
Urine to be tested arrives from the collecting officers responsible for
taking it from the athletes in two identical bottles. One is called the
B sample and is frozen for long-term storage. The seal on the A sample
is broken and small amounts are then taken and chemically treated to
start the search for prohibited substances.
Up to 90 per cent of samples breeze through the battery of tests and
are quickly declared “all clear”. Others require a little
more attention. “We see something that’s allowable, but could
it be hiding something that’s prohibited?” Such masking agents
are a growing problem in the fight against doping. Some tests to find
athletes taking the anabolic steroid testosterone, for example, rely
on the fact that the supplements throw the body’s chemistry out
of kilter: specifically, the ratio between natural testosterone and its
sister chemical epitestosterone.
Taking supplements of the sister drug alongside the active steroid makes
the ratio appear normal. Balco laboratories, the controversial site in
California at the heart of the THG inquiry, markets a mixture of testosterone
and epitestosterone.
“
That one is dead easy science, but what was clever was that they had
the knowledge of our tests. That’s one of the reasons it is better
if we don’t all use the same methods,” Dr Cowan says.
Back in the laboratory, the suspect 10 per cent of samples are subjected
to closer scrutiny. “When it becomes a more solid suspect then
we go right back to the original A bottle and analyse it specifically
for that substance.”
About 1 per cent of samples tested are positive — down from 2 to
3 per cent when testing was introduced.
“It is obvious that drug testing does help to control drug abuse
in sport,” says
Dr Cowan. But to reduce it further and to tackle the problem of designer
drugs like THG, Dr Cowan believes sweeping changes are needed to the
current system. “The interesting thing about THG is that we couldn’t
have found it from urine samples alone; the concentrations are just too
small. Give us a few litres and we’ll identify it, but give us
just 75ml and that is really pushing it.”
THG was only identified because traces were found in a syringe handed
anonymously to the US authorities. Knock-on effects
Dr Cowan says that rather than trying to find the drugs themselves,
we should be watching for their knock-on effects on athletes’ physiology.
Testing sports stars more regularly and comparing the tests month-on-month
could allow the authorities to build up a profile of normal hormone
levels in each individual. “Then if you use THG we would start
to get suspicious because, if we had your profile, we would see that
your androgens are suppressed.”
He says this system would be much harder to beat. “I’d be
able to say, ‘Wait a minute. What’s happened to you suddenly?
Last month you were like that and now you’ve changed this’.
I think that would make the whole system a lot more powerful.”
It could also clear innocent athletes tainted with drug allegations. “Athletes
want a level playing field and they want us to do it properly. If we’re
not doing it properly then a number of them on the borderline are going
to go to the wrong side of the rules.”
Dr Cowan will not be drawn on how many athletes may currently be getting
away with drug use, and how many could have drugs rather than talent
and training to thank for the gold medals they will win in Athens. But
he insists they will not get away with it for ever. “One of the
things about cheats is that they keep cheating,” he says. “And
we catch them in the end.”
Correction
We should have described David Cowan as Professor Coawn not Dr Cowan.
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The
Pharmaceutical Journal
Now that the Olympic Games are under way, the issue of
drugs in sport is bound to be in the news. David Adam discussed the subject
with pharmacist David Cowan, who runs an International Olympic Committee-accredited
laboratory in London where athletes' samples are tested