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Comment by profinger | Hacker News Reader

How do these drug tests work? I was under the impression that drug tests only found things that they were looking for. How did they know to be looking for this new drug? I'm googling to try to figure it out but maybe someone is familiar with this process?

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I don't know the details in the case of this new drug, but in the last few years there has been a lot of collaboration between drug manufacturers and anti-doping testers. For example, when CERA was introduced, the manufacturer worked closely with WADA to develop tests before the drug even hit the market. Here's an article from that time - I assume a similar collaboration was at work with this new drug:

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/manufacturer-helped-wada-wit...

The World Anti-Doping Agency constantly update their list of prohibited substances and develop new tests on a proactive basis. FG-4592 (and a number of similar compounds) have been on the prohibited list since the beginning of 2015. The list can be seen at the list below, and it is extremely comprehensive. Several other substances are not currently prohibited, but are monitored for their possible use as performance enhancing drugs.

Alongside track and field athletes, cyclists are the most tested athletes in any sport, and are subject to three core testing regimes.

Firstly, cyclists are subject to in-competition testing. The winner of any race (or the stage of a race) and a random sample of other riders will be subject to blood or urine tests.

Secondly, the whereabouts program requires cyclists to notify the authorities of their location every day to facilitate out-of-competition testing. Athletes are randomly sampled, with extra scrutiny paid to the strongest performers.

Thirdly, the biological passport scheme creates a long-term profile of a rider's physiology, to track changes in markers like testosterone/epitestosterone ratio and hematocrit that may indicate the use of performance enhancing drugs or methods. A sudden change in any of these markers or deviation outside normal ranges is grounds for sanctioning.

In all tests, two samples are taken to safeguard against anomalous measurements or failures in the chain of custody. A portion of both samples is stored indefinitely, to facilitate retroactive testing if new drugs or methods are discovered.

https://wada-main-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/resources/files/wada...

Maybe looking for certain things to be out of an expected/naturally maintainable range? Comparing to previous tests for the same competitors?

Drug tests don't actually look for drugs. They look for deviations from normal in your body's chemistry.

It depends. Floyd Landis was pinched by a test performed on a mass spectrometer !

Maybe. Part of the reason that he contested it for so long was that although he had doped he had not actually taken anything that would produce the reported result.

What? Yes they do. They look for the chemical itself or its metabolites. Getting a sample sent off to a lab usually means "give this to a facility that can perform a GC/MS or whatnot and has enough reference samples on hand to determine what is in this fluid"

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