Perspectives and strategies for anti-doping analysis

Bioanalysis is continually evolving and reaching new goals. Within this unending process, anti-doping analysis follows its own trajectory, but cannot go forward alone and has to use all of the bioanalytical strategies and tools, adapting them to sport testing. Among these, biological matrix choice is one of the most important weapons. Samples alternative to blood and urine have to be considered, since they can provide complementary information, or specifically accumulate some substances. Dried miniaturized matrices have substantial advantages over wet ones, such as a generally better stability at room temperature and consequently more favorable behavior during storage and transportation. For these reasons, dried microsampling and MS analysis represent probably the best prospect to become one of the golden standards at the forefront of anti-doping bioanalysis research. Coupling this setup with sample pretreatment and analysis automation and miniaturization could produce important progress in this field.