If Sleeping Beauty were still lying in the woods today, a dried drop of her blood would be enough to understand which narcotic the wicked witch gave her. The awakening would be entrusted to the saving kiss of the prince, but the diagnosis would be quick, effective and not very painful.
Well, a similar methodology (without the kiss) can be applied today to sport to check if the competitor is doing use of prohibited substances or not. At an experimental level, this method has already been successfully introduced at the last Winter Olympics, together with the traditional methodology.
The merit is of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency or World Anti-Doping Agency) which has funded specific research projects related to sports analysis, for urine and blood, in collaboration with the Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology of the Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna. The scientific director is the Professor Laura Mercolini, in collaboration with other international research centres.
The benefits of these are countless protocols on dried samples (the biological fluid must be left to dry on an ad hoc support): from the less intrusiveness of the sampling (in the case of blood it is a small prick on a finger instead of a venipuncture), to the lack of test tubes, to the simplification of cold chain. Consider that the analyzes which athletes are subjected to every year can be numerous and each collection includes a few milliliters of blood or urine. Containers have to be transported, stored and stored for years.
Dried microsamples address and solve some of these problems, as the storage is at room temperature, logistics are simpler and there is a clear economic saving.
We spoke directly to Professor Mercolini about this new method.
Professor, where is your research at?
“We have been collaborating with WADA for years and the projects we are working on are very interesting. To date we have provided some "proofs of concept" of our research with excellent results and the work of the various groups has merged into a series of solid data reported in the scientific literature".
What is the last job you did??
“The best known microsampling technique is the “dried blood spot” (DBS) and these are spots of dried blood. A few drops of blood are collected using specific certified devices on which instrumental analyzes are conducted.
In a similar way we are working on urine”.
Would you be able to quantify, in economic terms, the savings that this methodology can bring?
“What I can say with certainty is that at the beginning it is necessary to bear the costs of high-level scientific research, but then they are amortized and the evidence of savings will be important. Think of the methods of obtaining the sample, transport, handling for analysis, processing. Each step has many sub-steps, and with these new methods there is a significant simplification.
Sampling is simple, but the quantitative and qualitative data is excellent. So we are faced with a potentially cheaper, simpler, innovative and more reliable method”.
Will altering procedures become more difficult?
“Reducing sample manipulations during analyzes is already a good start, with fewer steps and less theoretical probabilities.”
Can any doping substance be identified with the new technique?
“At present, the WADA list of prohibited substances is extensive and periodically updated. Therefore, the usability of the technique cannot be generalized and supported a priori. To date we have evidence from the scientific literature on a good number of compounds prohibited in sport, but my research group has developed and published microsampling methods also for other applications, e.g. cannabis, cocaine, opioids”.
So this method also has applications outside of sport?
“Yes, we started years ago in the field of pharmaco-toxicological analysis for the therapeutic monitoring of drugs, for example to check the patient's adherence to therapy. Think of the need for continuous therapies that require constant analytical monitoring, or in any case frequent over time, with a view to increasingly precision medicine. These methods are also applicable to the analysis of substances of abuse, to verify their intake in the various contexts of forensic pharmaco-toxicological analyses. In fact, we have been working in collaboration with both clinical colleagues and forensic toxicologists for years. We deal with blood and urine, but also with hair and saliva. And not only".
Are these also useful elements?
“Hair is a kind of story and the longer it is, the more it takes us back in time”.
Your next steps?
“We are always focused on microsampling and its potential for various biological fluids, with a constant eye on compounds of interest in the field of sport. We test and validate our methods to verify that the technique works and is valid over time. One week, six, one year, two years. And I would say that we are at a good point”.
