Molecularly Imprinted Polymers: A New Generation of Affinity Matrices

The increased use of pharmaceutical drugs for human and veterinary applications provides an important clinical solution to the treatment of disease; however, there are technical challenges involved in monitoring these drugs in biological and environmental matrices. Quantitation of pharmaceutically active compounds and their metabolites in blood, serum, or urine is difficult, often requiring tedious analytical procedures. A further complication is that certain pharmacologically useful compounds, such as the antibiotic chloramphenicol or the group of beta-agonists that are used as growth promoters in animals, are frequently banned in foodstuffs of animal origin to be used for human consumption. For these types of compounds, the extremely low detection limits set by various organizations (i.e., EU, FDA, and U.S. EPA) place pressure on the analytical detection methods and demand labor-intensive preparation and analysis steps.