BIPM-WADA Symposium on Standards and Metrology in support of Anti-Doping Analysis

28-29 September 2016 (at the BIPM)

Steering Committee

The BIPM hosted a joint symposium with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) on 28-29 September. One hundred invited experts from National Measurement Institutes, the clinical chemistry and laboratory medicine community and from WADA and the WADA-accredited anti-doping laboratories met over the two days to discuss the latest initiatives in areas of metrology for organic and biological analysis relevant to this high-profile measurement sector.

The official opening of the meeting was addressed by the French Minister of State for Sport, attached to the Minister of Urban Affairs, Youth and Sport, Mr Thierry Braillard, by the Chair of the WADA Health and Medical Research Commission, Dr Valerie Fourneyron, and by the Director of Special Projects at NIST, Dr Richard Cavanagh.

The aims of the symposium were:

• to assess current needs and emerging priorities for the provision of reference materials and reference measurement systems to support activities in anti-doping analysis;
• to discuss the implementation of inter-laboratory comparisons to demonstrate equivalent measurement results for quantitative and qualitative analysis for prohibited substances and endogenous markers;
• to share knowledge on approaches used in NMIs, clinical chemistry and doping control laboratories for the detection and quantification of chemical and biological analytes in urine and blood matrices.

The two days of presentations covered topics including recent developments of reference materials for doping substances, testing methods and reference measurement procedures for the detection of doping with steroids, peptides, proteins or by genetic modification, approaches to assigning the measurement uncertainty of quantitative measurement results and best practice for the establishment of detection limits for the qualitative identification of banned substances.