Tackling Analytical Challenges in Sports Drug Testing by Mass Spectrometric Approaches Mario Thevis (Presenter) German Sport University, Cologne, Germany European Monitoring Center for Emerging Doping Agents (EuMoCEDA), Cologne/Bonn, Germany Presenter Bio: Dr Thevis graduated in organic chemistry and sports sciences in 1998. He earned his PhD in Biochemistry in 2001 and did post-doctoral research at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2002. After being a senior researcher from 2003 to 2005 he was appointed as Professor for Preventive Doping Research at the German Sport University Cologne in 2006. Mario Thevis further qualified as Forensic Chemist, acts as director of the European Monitoring Center for Emerging Doping Agents (EuMoCEDA), and is Editor-in-Chief of DRUG TESTING & ANALYSIS. Since 2014, Professor Thevis is also vice president for research at the German Sport University Cologne.

Sports drug testing laboratories are facing multifaceted challenges including the misuse of naturally/endogenously occurring substances, non-approved/discontinued drug candidates, urine manipulation, etc. In order to provide best-possible analytical performance, mass spectrometry-based approaches are predominantly utilized to detect prohibited substances and methods of doping. With the constantly increasing analytical requirements concerning the number of target compounds, the complexity and range of physico-chemical properties of analytes (e.g., inorganic ionic transition metals, gases, lipids, alkaloids, peptides, proteins, DNA/RNA-based drugs, etc.) as well as the desire to accelerate analyses and obtain information allowing also for retrospective data mining, high resolution/high accuracy mass spectrometry has become a mainstay in doping controls. In that context, various assays have been reported, enabling either multi-component analyses of low- or high molecular mass measurands or the specific and dedicated (confirmatory) detection of prohibited substances.

Selected applications will be presented reporting on examples of recent findings in routine sports drug testing, demonstrating both the inventiveness of cheating individuals that undermine current anti-doping efforts as well as the relevance of in-depth investigations into unusual findings, where the athletes’ innocence was to be shown albeit prohibited substances were unequivocally identified in their doping control urine samples.

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