Novel molecularly imprinted polymers for the selective extraction and determination of metoclopramide in human serum and urine samples using high-performance liquid chromatography

This work was performed in order to study the possibilities in using molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) as sorbent material in solid-phase extraction (MISPE) for the sample clean-up technique for the determination of metoclopramide (MCP) in biological fluids. The effective factors influencing the bulk polymerization have been studied. Molecular recognition properties, binding capability and selectivity of the molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) were evaluated and the results revealed the obtained MIPs have high affinity for MCP in aqueous environment. The optimal conditions for solid-phase extraction (SPE) consisted of conditioning with 1 mL of methanol and 1 mL of deionized water at neutral pH, loading with 1 mL of the water sample (50 μg L−1) at pH 8.5, washing using 1 mL of acetone and elution with 2× 1 mL methanol/acetic acid (10/1, v/v). After optimization of SPE procedure, the MIP was then directly used to selectively extract the target drug from human serum and urine with an extraction recovery of more than 90%. Chromatograms of the eluate solutions show an efficient clean-up, which supports the potential of MISPE for clean-up of trace amounts of MCP from serum and urine. The limits of detection of MCP in human serum and urine were 3 and 1.2 μg L−1, respectively.