Gel Electrophoretic Detection of Black Market ACE‐031
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The usage of ACE-031 (Ramatercept), a dimeric fusion protein consisting of a human activin receptor IIB (ACVR2B) fragment linked to an Fc-part of human IgG1, is banned according to chapter S4.3 of the "WADA 2024 List of Prohibited Substances and Methods" due to its potential performance enhancing properties. While ACE-031 has not yet been pharmaceutically approved, it is sold as research chemical on the "black market" (BM). The article presents a study on BM ACE-031 products and its detection by gel-electrophoresis and Western blotting. Of 14 tested products, only 12 contained an ACVR2B-immunoreactive protein. Electrophoretic separation by SDS-PAGE also showed that the 12 ACVR2B-products contained many other proteins in addition to the main compound (ca. 58.4 kDa). Further analyses by mass spectrometry and immunoblotting revealed that the 12 products contained the full-length human activin receptor IIB instead of ACE-031. The absence of an Fc-fusion protein was further confirmed by treatment with IdeS protease, which was unable to cleave the BM products. In addition, it was demonstrated that the protocol we developed to detect luspatercept (another ACVR2B-Fc fusion protein) in human serum could also be successfully applied for the detection of BM ACE-031. Because administering black market products to human subjects was not ethically justifiable, a study was conducted with rats. In rat serum, BM ACE-031 was detectable up to 48 h post administration. However, due to the relatively high dose applied (10 mg/kg body weight) and possible differences in metabolism, the detection window may be different in humans.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".