Recent developments, characteristics and potential applications of screen-printed electrodes in pharmaceutical and biological analysis

Screen-printed electrodes (SPEs) have gone through significant improvements over the past few decades with respect to both their format and their printing materials. Thus, SPEs have been successfully applied for the in situ detection of a plethora of analytes in a wide range of sample matrixes due to their advantageous material properties, such as disposability, simplicity, and rapid responses. In particular, the development of electrochemical sensors based on SPEs for pharmaceutical analysis has received massive consideration since they enable the rapid screening of the pharmaceutical compounds in complex matrixes, requiring small volumes of samples and no pre-treatment steps. This review summarizes the design and the working principles of electrochemical sensors based on SPEs applied to the quantification of pharmaceutical and biological compounds. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.