Drug testing breakthrough in polymer research

by Rich Bowden - Dec 29 2008, 20:09

An international team of scientists has introduced a breakthrough in the use of polymer research that will make it easier to detect drug use and promote faster and more efficient medicines.

The research, which was published in the December edition of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Journal, has the potential to replace a number of drug tests for sports people with a single test that can detect enzymes, proteins and drugs in blood.

"Currently, these things tend to be done with rather complicated procedures," said Dr. Michael Stockenhuber from Newcastle University in Australia to the AAP.

"You have to go through a lot of machines. But these MIPs (Molecular Imprinted Polymers) have the potential to do this with a single probe," added Dr. Stockenhuber, who collaborated on the project with colleagues from Cardiff University in Wales.

"It is a bit of a lock and key mechanism. If you have a (drug-related) key in your blood, it falls into the lock," he said. "You'd have a reading and you'd know almost immediately... All the other keys that are floating around have no effect."

Dr. Stockenhuber said the new technology should be ready for use by sports bodies within a decade. He also pointed to the technology's potential to be used in the slow release of drugs in the human body in such areas as cancer-fighting medicines.

"You take this polymer, which has no problem with rejection, and you put it near the organ where the cancer is and it would slowly release these cancer-fighting drugs over years," he said. "It's very selective. Your drug is seeping in [but] nothing else will go in there."

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