Just when we thought there were no other drugs or ways of getting them into the body, whether for treating disease or in search of a ‘hit’ or to improve sporting performance, along comes some fascinating new advances in drug design and drug delivery.

The concept of vaccinating against disease has been a reality for decades (eg. smallpox, tetanus etc) but what about the concept of vaccinating against poor sporting performance? This would a sure-fire guarantee for success, genetic manipulations in the future aside. This is not merely ‘pie-in-the-sky’ stuff. Pain vaccines are already in human trials and potential fatigue vaccines are being investigated in mice. It is inevitable then that many regular drugs will also find a way into the body via a vaccine type delivery system.   

Just like the proverbial junkies who search for ever-decreasing routes of entry because their veins are collapsing or their nasal passages are destroyed due to continued abuse of illicit drugs, the sports drug cheats are also on the lookout for better ways to get faster results. Research in Germany recently showed that a vaccine injected (tattooed) through the skin was roughly 16 times more efficient in eliciting a response in the body than delivering the same vaccine via the ‘normal’ route of injection into muscle. In other words, the same amount of vaccine injected into the skin produced a response 16 times greater than when injected into muscle. The implications for sport are potentially huge.

Analytically speaking, sports drugs are banned on the basis that they are not only detectable but also that they have breached a pre-determined threshold. So imagine a drug that could deliver the same physiological improvements but only required one-sixteenth of the concentration. By implication then the analysers would have to be even more sensitive than they are today or threshold limits would have to be even further reduced probably resulting in thresholds existing around the ‘noise’ level (or error capabilities) of such instruments. The lawyers would have a field day. 

Potentially these types of drugs delivered in this manner could permanently fly under the radar. Maybe this was Marion Jones' modus operandi. She tested negative about 160 times despite her very public admissions of doping. I wonder does she have any tattoos?

Maybe one day tattoos may need to be banned because its probably not only ink that is being injected (tattooed) into the skin. The testers are in a continual battle to expand the variety of mediums to test for drugs such are the advances. Urine, blood and in the not too distant future genes will be tested and now ‘skin testing’ may need to be added to this growing list because these ‘vaccines’ probably won’t show up in urine, blood and genes. But wait, what about brain doping, the final frontier perhaps? I’d like to see anyone try to get ethics approval to do brain biopsies on drug cheats, though; but then again how many of them have brains anyway?