Cell culture as a toolbox to generate phase I metabolites for antidoping screening

The knowledge of the biotransformation of compounds prohibited by the World Anti Doping Agency is of high concern as doping analyses are mostly based on the detection of metabolites instead of the parent compounds abused by athletes. While the self-administration of doping-relevant compounds is from an ethical point of view a rather problematic method to investigate metabolism, the usage of cell culture systems allows for studies on biotransformation in vitro. Five cell culture models with different tissue origin (liver, ovary, skin, kidney, and testis) were comparatively incubated with testosterone and epitestosterone as well as with the synthetic testosterone derivatives 17 alpha-methyltestosterone and 4-chlorotestosterone to investigate the impact of synthetic modifications on phase I metabolic pathways. Cell culture supernatants were analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. All cell lines possessed the default steroid phase I biotransformation reactions. The highest conversion rate was observed in ovarian (BG-1) and liver cells (HepG2). For BG-1 and skin cells (HaCaT), the 5 alpha-reductase products 5 alpha-dihydrotestosterone (for both) and 5 alpha-androstane-3 alpha/beta,17 beta-diol (for BG-1 solely) were found to be prevailing after testosterone incubation. In kidney (COS-1) and HepG2 cells, the 17 beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase activity was predominant as supported by the observation that the 17 alpha-OH (epitestosterone) and the methyl group (17 alpha-methyltestosterone) impeded the conversion rate in these cell lines. In conclusion, future work should extend the characterization of the BG-1 and HepG2 cells on phase II metabolic pathways to examine whether they are suitable models for the generation of metabolite reference collections comparable to those obtained by human excretion studies.

Automated summary

The study investigates the biotransformation of synthetic testosterone derivatives in different cell culture models, showing variations in metabolic pathways among different cell lines. BG-1 and HepG2 cells exhibited the highest conversion rates in phase I metabolism, suggesting their potential as suitable models for the generation of metabolite reference collections.