Molecularly Imprinted Polymer Solid Phase Extraction followed by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography as an Efficient and Sensitive Technique for Determination of Meropenem in Human Plasma and Urine

Abstract

A new and selective sorbent for molecularly imprinted polymer solid-phase extraction (MIP-SPE) was prepared to extract meropenem from plasma and urine samples. The extracted analyte was analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled with photodiode array detection. Methacrylic acid (MAA) as functional monomer, ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EGDMA) as cross-linker, azobisisobutyronitrile (AIBN) as an initiator and meropenem as a template molecule were used for the MIP preparation. Imprinted meropenem molecule was removed from the polymeric structure using acetonitrile in water (1:9, v/v), as the eluent solvent. Under the optimized conditions, the limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) were 35 and 120 µg L-1 , respectively. The developed MIP-SPE method demonstrates that it could be applied for the determination of meropenem in plasma and urine samples. KEYWORDS Molecularly imprinted polymer, solid-phase extraction, meropenem, human urine and plasma, high-performance liquid chromatography.

Selective Solid-Phase Extraction of Meropenem from Human Blood Plasma Using a Molecularly Imprinted Polymer

“…SPE was favorable recently because of its simplicity, short time procedure and minimal of solvent consuming. The development of sample pretreatment of antibiotics, especially meropenem, using, for example, SPE and column switching methods have been reported to be due to the combination of SPE-chromatography for the determination of some kinds of medicine [8]. However, the extraction of antibiotics as analytes using the SPE method is rather difficult due to the lack of selectivity.…”