Combating substance abuse in sports with LC/MS/MS Systems from Applied Biosystems

FL near Newmarket, UK, is the only laboratory in the world engaged in both sports doping control and pharmaceutical contract research, and these activities depend on a fleet of Applied Biosystems LC/MS/MS Systems, including a 4000 Q TRAP® and API 2000™, API 3000™, API 4000™ and API 5000™ Systems.

"HFL's pharmaceutical contract research business has grown significantly over the last few years and, since our WADA accreditation in 2004, we have been doing all the routine screening for banned substances in athletes as well as racing animals," explained Dr Steve Pleasance, Director of Contract Research at HFL. "Samples are routinely sent to us from national and international sports events."

"Traditionally, drug surveillance used GC/MS methods, but we have introduced LC/MS techniques to combat the recent changes in abused substances, which have become more potent and more polar. The Applied Biosystems' LC/MS/MS Systems are essentially the industry standard; we primarily acquired them for quantitative analyses for our pharmaceutical contract research, but we have naturally progressed into using them for drug surveillance as we can perform qualitative LC/MS assays that detect 50 or more analytes simultaneously."

"We need to perform a variety of different types of analyses; for human athletics surveillance there is a list of prohibited substances that we routinely test for. However, when looking at horse racing samples, for example, we need to be able to identify, as well as screen for, a whole host of different compounds - it really is a case of looking for a needle in a haystack!"