Researchers in Queensland believe they’ve found a new technique for drug testing in sport, which could lead to advanced anti-doping tests.

A team from Bond University have been studying white blood cells’ reactions to levels of human growth hormone, they say they’ve identified a marker within the cells which would point to the use of the banned performance enhancer.

Dr Bon Gray from Bond recently presented a report to a World Anti-Doping Agency symposium in Beijing.

"The key problem with actually measuring growth hormone directly is it only lasts in the blood for about 20 minutes or so,” he said.

"By looking at the changes in genes, we've actually found changes that persist for up to three weeks after the last dose of growth hormone... the current test used by WADA, you only have a window of detection of a day and a half, 36 hours or so."