MAIIA - the new EPO test

[rata de sentina]

Currently too expensive and academic to be applied in a PED context, but it's only a question of time.

EPO will never be produced in marketable quantities in this way. It's ridiculous that people waste good grant money on such dumb science. Why is the NIH funding such stuff. Unbelievable.

 

[Hematide]

EPO will never be produced in marketable quantities in this way. It's ridiculous that people waste good grant money on such dumb science. Why is the NIH funding such stuff. Unbelievable.

Because this science paves the way for other syntheses of complex glycoproteins and because different single isoforms of epo could lead to different and useful selectivities?

 

[biokemguy]

EPO will never be produced in marketable quantities in this way. It's ridiculous that people waste good grant money on such dumb science. Why is the NIH funding such stuff. Unbelievable.

Not to go way off topic, but the drive to fund only application based science is short sided and bad for science IMHO (I'm somebody who can't wait to get out of academia).

This particular synthesis could lead to better understanding of how EPO interacts with it's receptor and maybe answer why we produce so many different glycoforms (more accurate term than isoform) in the first place.

 

[rata de sentina]

Because this science paves the way for other syntheses of complex glycoproteins and because different single isoforms of epo could lead to different and useful selectivities?

Yeah I can parrot the authors too. Considering the effort they've gone way overboard. There's a perfectly good biological way to synthesise complex glycoproteins and it ain't this. I do basic science too and I consider this silly.

 

[Hematide]

Yeah I can parrot the authors too. Considering the effort they've gone way overboard. There's a perfectly good biological way to synthesise complex glycoproteins and it ain't this. I do basic science too and I consider this silly.

Look man, I do synthesis and there are several things in these papers that are useful beyond synthesis of glycoproteins that are easily biologically synthesized (although I dare you to propose a "perfectly good" biological way to make pure epo isoforms with unnatural glycoside substitutions).
e.g. a metal free dethiylation ligation strategy was developed through this work. If you don't understand how this technique is important, game-changing and immensely useful in many ways, we are done talking.

 

[neineinei]

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dta.1752/abstract

http://www.dagensmedisin.no/nyheter/kan-bli-billigere-og-enklere-a-epo-teste/

Recombinant analogues of erythropoietin (EPO), epoetins, have been misused by athletes due to their performance enhancing effect since the first pharmaceutical epoetin was launched in 1987. The current methods for screening urine and plasma samples for the presence of epoetins, IEF and SAR-PAGE, have high sensitivity but are time-consuming to carry out. In an effort to ease and speed up the screening procedure for EPO, MAIIA Diagnostics has developed a combined affinity chromatography and lateral flow immunoassay, MAIIA EPO SeLect, which determines the percentage of migrated isoforms (PMI) of EPO in a sample. The reproducibility of the kit was tested by analyzing a set of negative and positive urine and plasma samples in three different laboratories. All data were analyzed with both curve fit parameters from the individual assay runs, and with lot-specific predefined curve calibration. To get a measure of endogenous variation, a normative study with athlete urine and plasma samples was conducted. The average intra-laboratory variation was 6.7% while the inter-laboratory variation for all samples was calculated to 8.8%. The athlete samples yielded an average PMI and standard deviation of 71.4 ± 7.7 for urine and 83.1 ± 10.2 for plasma, respectively. There were no signs of deviating results from tested effort urines. The results also support the use of predefined curve parameters.

 

[Tyler'sTwin]

Anti-doping researcher Yvette Dehnes claims micro-doses of EPO "small enough to have no effect on blood parameters" are now detectable for 18-24 hours.

"It is no longer the case that they can inject in the evening and be safe in the morning."

http://www.adressa.no/100Sport/langrenn/article489131.snd

 

[neineinei]

CIRC doesn't seem to have interviewed anyone involved with the MAIIA EPO SeLect test (the "micro-dose" test). If the test is what they promise there will not be any need for night time testing for EPO, that window will be closed. Rather than protesting against night testing riders should ask UCI to make WADA speed up the process to approve the MAIIA test.

(....) Maiia EPO SELECT, "has been known to people in the field for several years," says Dehnes, "and many hope that will pass the final tests of WADA for use in doping analysis."

http://www.tv2.no/a/6460557 (Norw)