Stockholm Laboratory Receives Six-Month Partial Suspension from WADA

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has delivered a six-month partial suspension to the Doping Control Laboratory at the Karolinska University Hospital (Stockholm Laboratory).

The partial suspension is related to the Stockholm Laboratory’s gas chromatography combustion isotope ration mass spectrometry (GC/C/IRMS) method. A non-conformity with the International Standard for Laboratories (ISL) was discovered for the GC/C/IRMS method and was followed by a disciplinary proceeding.

The provisional partial suspension was announced on August 2, 2018 and will last for a period of six months from the original suspension decision (August 1, 2018) or until the Chairman of the WADA Executive Committee reinstates the lab’s accreditation.

According to WADA’s announcement, the Stockholm Laboratory can continue with regular anti-doping activities, but any samples that would require GC/C/IRMS analysis will need to be securely transported to a different WADA-accredited laboratory.

GC/C/IRMS instruments became commercially available in 1990 and were introduced to the Olympic Games at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games for demonstration purposes. Two years later, GC/C/IRMS instruments were used at the 1998 Nagana Winter Games to analyze 450 samples. The GC/C/IRMS instruments have “provided doping control with the ability to disciriminate…between endogenous steroid metabolites and their synthetically derived analogs,” according to the Journal of Mass Spectrometry.

Read the full announcement from WADA here.

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