Electrochemical multi-drug sensors: Current advances, challenges, and future perspectives

The rapid growth of the pharmaceutical industry has highlighted the importance of controlling both the quality control process and appropriate dosing in drug purchasing to a critical level. In addition to this, pharmaceutical pollutants can harm the environment, especially water resources, creating a need for low-cost, sensitive, selective, and portable technologies to monitor personal health and environmental applications. Because monitoring more than one drug simultaneously provides convenience in terms of diagnosis and treatment, it increases the drug monitoring capacity and features. Therefore, various electrochemical methods and micro/nanomaterials integration have been employed to achieve well-separated peaks for drug molecules and enhance sensitivity. However, detecting more than one drug using an electrochemical method remains a challenging research topic. This review discusses electrochemical multi-drug (bio)sensing techniques, focusing on future trends. For this purpose, drugs were categorized as anticancer, anti-inflammatory, antidepressant, antibacterial, antiviral, and antifungal according to the area they act on. Moreover, integration of herbal drugs, which are highlighted by their rising therapeutic importance and intricate phytochemical compositions, has found place in electrochemical sensing. Current electrochemical (bio)sensors that detect multiple drugs for each group were discussed. In addition, mixed-type multi-drugs containing different drug groups were also discussed in a separate section.