Background:
Electroanalytical techniques play a very important role in the areas of medicinal,
clinical as well as pharmaceutical research. Amongst these techniques, the voltammetric methods
for the determination of drugs using nanomaterials based chemically modified electrodes (CMEs)
have received enormous attention in recent years. This is due to the sensitivity and selectivity they
provide on qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of the electroactive analyte under study. The aim
of the present review was to discuss the work on nanomaterials based CMEs for the analysis of drugs
covering the period from 2000 to present employing various voltammetric techniques for different
classes of the drugs.
Methods:
The present review deals with the determination of different classes of drugs including analgesics,
anthelmentic, anti-TB, cardiovascular, antipsychotics and anti-allergic, antibiotic and gastrointestinal
drugs. Also, a special section is devoted for enantioanalysis of certain chiral drugs using
voltammetry. The detailed information of the voltammetric determination for the drugs from each
class employing various techniques such as differential pulse voltammetry, cyclic voltammetry, linear
sweep voltammetry, square wave voltammetry, stripping voltammetry, etc. are presented in tabular
form below the description of each class in the review.
Results:
Various nanomaterials including carbon nanotubes, graphene, carbon nanofibers, quantum
dots, metal/metal oxide nanoparticles, polymer based nanocomposites have been used by researchers
for the development of CMEs over a period of time. The large surface area to volume ratio, high conductivity,
electrocatalytic activity and biocompatibility make them ideal modifiers where they produce
synergistic effect which helps in trace level determination of pharmaceutical, biomedical and medicinal
compounds. In addition, macrocyclic compounds as chiral selectors have been used for the determination
of enantiomeric drugs where one of the isomers captured in the cavities of chiral selector
shows stronger binding interaction for one of the enantiomorphs.
Conclusion:
arious kinds of functional nanocomposites have led to the manipulation of peak potential
due to drug - nanoparticles interaction at the modified electrode surface. This has facilitated the
simultaneous determination of drugs with almost similar peak potentials. Also, it leads to the enhancement
in voltammetric response of the analytes. It is expected that such modified electrodes can
be easily miniaturized and used as portable, wearable and user friendly devices. This will pave a way
for in-vivo onsite real monitoring of single as well as multi component pharmaceutical compounds.
Determination of thiols by capillary electrophoresis with electrochemical detection using a palladium field-decoupler and chemically modified electrodes
