Abstract
Drug (ab)use continues to have devastating consequences on human health and society. As large changes have occurred recently in the recreational drug market throughout Europe, such as new psychoactive substances, chemical modifications and isomerisations of typical illicit drugs, novel analytical challenges arose. These chemicals contain multiple drugs or even isomers that are specifically designed to evade current on-site test and international drug legislation. The proposed REVAMP project has the ambitious goal to revive electrochemical detection in liquid chromatography (HPLC). The goal is to create and study the coupling of a new electrochemical detector based on a screen printed electrode (SPE) array with HPLC to develop for the first time a mobile benchtop device able to identify drugs on-site with an enhanced selectivity towards isomers and polydrug detection. The main problem of conventional electrochemical detection (reproducibility and polishing) will be tackled by using SPE's. Although electrochemical detection is an inviting approach to detect a wide variety of compounds, given its high sensitivity (low/sub-ng/ml), low cost and miniaturization opportunities, the methodological coupling to LC with SPE's is lacking. The obtained strategies can be transferred to analytes with often similar functionalities such as antibiotics, phenolic compound and explosives.
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