The state-of-the-art of molecularly imprinted polymers based electrochemical sensors and their applications in drug assay

Pharmaceutical analysis holds great importance in various fields covering drug quality control, disease treatment, food safety and environmental monitoring. As a kind of artificial antibody with designed specific recognition sites, molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) have aroused great interest among researchers due to their remarkable merits of being customizable, reusable, and highly stable in harsh conditions. To date, MIP-based electrochemical sensors (MIP-ECSs) have been considerably reported for detecting varieties of pharmaceutical compounds, thus a systematic review is necessary to retrospect the latest development in this topic. Herein, we comprehensively review the recent progress in preparing MIPs and the novel detection strategies for improving the sensing performance of MIP-ECSs. In addition, the applications of MIP-ECSs in pharmaceutical analysis are overall investigated and reviewed, encompassing the detection of antibiotics and antivirals, anticancer drugs, psychotropic and addictive substances, and other kinds of drugs in different matrices. Finally, the potential challenges and prospectives of MIP-ECSs are discussed to further improve their detecting performance and achieve better feasibility and expanded applicability in pharmaceutical analysis.