Word: oxygenated
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...into the world of designer drugs created to evade detection. But the agency has started to close the gap. At the 2002 Winter Games, WADA tested the arriving athletes and surprised them with a more sophisticated test to detect darbopoeitin, a bioengineered hormone that dopes blood by increasing its oxygen content. On the basis of those results, the I.O.C. stripped three athletes of their eight medals...
Other labs are taking a different approach, focusing on enhancing the supply of oxygen that fuels everything the muscle cells do. And here too, athletes are eagerly dogging the footsteps of medical researchers, specifically those working to treat chronic anemias, conditions in which red blood cells dwindle to dangerously low levels, starving tissues of oxygen. In athletes, prolonged exertion leads to oxygen depletion in the muscles, which causes fatigue...
...shunt more oxygen to the muscles, but it comes at a price. "If you take too much EPO," explains WADA's Dr. Gary Wadler, professor of clinical medicine at New York University, "the production of red blood cells is excessive, and the blood becomes viscous--it's like sludge." In the late 1980s, when EPO became available, nearly 20 European cyclists died of causes that some experts suspect were linked...
Enhancing oxygen delivery is a broad frontier. The process theoretically can be manipulated at many points. "It is inevitable that other pharmacological avenues to stimulate red-cell production will be explored--and exploited," says Dr. Michael Ashenden, project coordinator for a global blood-doping research consortium funded by WADA and USADA. "Putting in an EPO gene is only one way to get the same result...
Instead of finding novel ways of delivering EPO, for example, some researchers are hoping to harness modified versions of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying workhorse in red blood cells. Artificial blood has long been a dream of doctors who face perpetual blood shortages, and in recent years that dream is closer to becoming reality. One promising approach involves extracting hemoglobin from living cells and using it alone as an oxygen transport system. Unfortunately, naked hemoglobin is quickly broken down in the body. Housing the hemoglobin in an artificial cell, or modifying the hemoglobin so it remains stable, could solve this problem...