The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority has dropped the University of Kentucky Equine Analytical Testing Laboratory from its list of accredited labs after its director, Dr. Scott Stanley, was removed from his position in the midst of a “ongoing personnel investigation,” HISA confirmed on Tuesday.
HISA and its drug-testing enforcement arm, the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit, stopped sending samples to the lab in mid-February, according to HISA, after meeting with University of Kentucky officials to discuss the performance of the lab. During that discussion, University of Kentucky officials told HISA and HIWU’s representatives that Stanley “was not permitted to be in direct communication with the other staff of the laboratory” because of the investigation.
The University of Kentucky officials also “expressed staffing concerns related to the laboratory’s operations” during their discussions with HISA and HIWU, the organizations said.
The precise nature of the investigation was not disclosed. Stanley, who received his doctorate from the University of Kentucky but spent much of his career in California, did not return a phone call on Tuesday.
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The University of Kentucky lab handled samples from races in Kentucky and Florida, according to HISA. Those samples are now being tested at Industrial Labs in Colorado.
“HISA and HIWU are fully confident in the ability of Industrial Laboratories to handle the increased volume of samples and ensure that all samples are processed and analyzed in compliance with the [Anti-Doping and Medication Control] program,” the organization said in a statement released late on Tuesday.
With the loss of the UK lab, HISA currently has five accredited labs to handle its testing workload.
Stanley, who became the lab’s director in 2018 after nearly three decades at the University of California-Davis, is considered one of the foremost experts in the field of equine testing. He was formally removed from his position at the head of the lab on March 1, according to HISA’s statement.
According to The Blood-Horse, which first reported the story, Stanley will remain with the University of Kentucky’s Gluck Equine Research Center.
A message left on Tuesday with the associate director of the lab, Dr. Cynthia Wood, was not returned.
HISA and HIWU said that they had opened an investigation into the lab’s performance and “are also cooperating with the university’s investigation.” The statement said that HISA and HIWU would not comment further until the investigations are concluded.
While at the University of Kentucky, Dr. Stanley has been continuing his research into the development of an “equine biological passport,” which would set baseline markers for individual horses that could be used to determine whether the horses have been receiving illegal substances that are otherwise difficult or impossible to detect.
“I’m going to be working at the university focusing on the biological passport effort as well as proteomics determinations as an anti-doping tool for future use in horses,”Stanley told The Blood-Horse.
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