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It is also not limited to the use of anabolic steroids, but includes the use of recombinant stimulant proteins and "blood doping" -- injecting large numbers of red blood cells into the serum to enhance endurance.
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newer challenge to those screening athletes for performance enhancing agents is gene doping. The premise is simple -- rather than injecting proteins or drugs that are easily detected in urine, users inject the gene encoding the stimulant factor. While steroid use and recombinant proteins can often be detected in athletes' urine, it has been thought that stimulant factors produced by users' own bodies would be much harder to distinguish from natural factors produced in the body. Phillipe Moullier and colleagues from the French
National Doping Laboratories have shown that monkeys that have been genetically doped with erythropoietin (EPO) have an altered form of the blood cell-boosting factor in their serum. In this case, the EPO gene was injected into the monkeys' muscle. Muscle is thought to be a likely target for gene dopers, as it is quite abundant and easily accessible by injection. However, the EPO protein produced in the muscle exhibited different post-translational processing than the endogenous protein, resulting in easy detection, providing hope that gene
doping may not be as difficult to detect as thought, at least when muscle is used as the target tissue. Further studies will be necessary to evaluate whether the urine test for EPO can detect the altered protein. The American Society of Gene Therapy is the largest medical professional organization representing researchers and scientists dedicated to discovering new gene therapies. ASGT was established in 1996, and has grown nearly 3,000 members. It is
committed to promoting and fostering the general field of research involving gene therapy and to promoting professional and public education in all areas of gene therapy.
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