Received on May 6, 2004
Accepted on October 8, 2004

Drug Monitoring and Toxicology

Development of Miniaturized Competitive Immunoassays on a Protein Chip as a Screening Tool for Drugs

¹ Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology, and National Engineering Research Center for Beijing Biochip Technology, Beijing, Peoples Republic of China, and Institute of Biomedicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Peoples Republic of China
² China Doping Control Center, Beijing, Peoples Republic of China
³ Aviva Antibody Corporation, San Diego, CA
⁴ Key Laboratory of Bioorganic Chemistry and Molecular Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Chemistry, Peking University, Beijing, Peoples Republic of China
⁵ National Engineering Research Center for Beijing Biochip Technology, Beijing, Peoples Republic of China

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jcheng{at}tsinghua.edu.cn.

Background: Doping in sports has become a serious problem. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) serves as an effective reference method, but it is limited by low throughput and is therefore not suitable for large-scale screening. Use of protein chips for high-throughput screening of all athletes for prohibited substances could become an important complementary tool to GC-MS.

Methods: We developed a protein chip based on an aldehyde-activated glass slide containing 10 physically isolated arrays. The chip was used to screen urine from 1347 athletes for prohibited substances and to screen a negative control group consisting of 200 females and 120 males. Urine samples from 66 individuals known to be abusers, provided by the China Doping Control Center (CDCC), and 129 standard prohibited substances were tested as positive controls.

Results: All 1347 urine samples screened by means of the protein chips were also subjected to reference analysis by GC-MS at the CDCC. There was no qualitative difference between the results obtained with the two methods. The correlation coefficient (r²) for the quantitative results obtained with the protein chip and GC-MS was 0.991.

Conclusions: The protein chip could be used to screen for a series of 16 prohibited drugs in urine samples. This system has the potential to become an effective screening method to test substances prohibited by the International Olympic Committee.