Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat by Cooper Chris

Author:Cooper, Chris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2012-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

Exotic drugs and the future of muscle doping

We have covered most of the drugs that we know have been used by athletes to improve their strength. But what does our knowledge of the pathway involved tells us about future developments? Genuinely new paradigm-shifting advances in sports performance drugs are likely to be related to compounds originating in studies in academic and pharmaceutical laboratories. Not surprisingly myostatin has come under intense scrutiny from the bodybuilding community. Just take a look again at the double muscled bull if you want to see the incentive. For surely if a genetically-induced reduction of myostatin led to massive muscle growth, then an athlete could get the same effect by taking a pill that inhibited myostatin?

There was even a candidate drug called follistatin, a natural protein that seemed to inhibit myostatin function. Increasing muscle mass could be of interest in a range of diseases where muscles become weakened, such as muscular dystrophy. For a while there was indeed interest from big pharmaceutical companies. Could a twenty-first century pharmaceutical race to produce myostatin inhibitors to cure muscle wasting diseases have the same effect on sport as the 1930s pharmaceutical race to create testosterone and its derivatives? Well maybe—the starting gun has been fired, but no one is yet anywhere near the finish line. For example follistatin itself binds to too many other things in the body to be useful as a drug when given externally; more success will likely require finding a way to increase the body’s own follistatin production. However, the side effects may be severe—follistatin is present and active in every cell of the body, not just muscle cells, and we are not at all clear of all its normal physiological roles.

What about completely novel myostatin inhibitors? Wyeth Pharmaceuticals did make such a product, called myo-029, that underwent preliminary clinical trials for treatment of muscular dystrophy. Like many current drugs this is an artificial antibody. The body produces protein antibodies to bind tightly to invading bacteria and viruses and target them for destruction. The same properties can be used by pharmaceutical companies to create novel antibody molecules that can bind tightly to any target—in this case myostatin was the selected target. The idea was that myo-029 would zero in on myostatin in the blood and render it inactive.

However, the results were not good enough to warrant taking drug production further. Although the drug appeared safe, and some of the muscle fibres isolated from their body did seem to show improvements, none of the patients showed significant strength increases. Although Wyeth subsequently claimed that they would look at other ways to block myostatin, their recent acquisition by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has probably put an end to that line of research; Pfizer have no interest in muscle wasting diseases. Curiously this one corporate pharmaceutical merger is likely to be more effective at slowing the pipeline of new muscle building drugs for athletes than any initiative by the anti-doping agencies.

Are there other places to look for the

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