Pharmaceutical applications of liquid-phase microextraction

Despite the significant advances in analytical equipment, measuring drugs in biological fluids, metabolic studies and determining their therapeutic range and side effects requires a sample preparation step, which is due to the low concentration of the drug and/or the complexity of the sample matrix. In fact, sample preparation is considered as the bottle-neck of an analytical procedure and this issue has led to the emergence and developments of a wide range of solid or liquid based extraction methods in both macro and micro scales. This review intends to study the pharmaceutical applications of liquid-phase microextraction (LPME) methods, in which principal, history, pros and cons, influence of the key experimental factors, commercialization and automation, recent developments and future directions will be discussed. Finally, different LPME methods are compared in terms of repeatability, sample cleanup, extraction efficiency, operational simplicity and automation possibility for pharmaceutical applications in routine laboratories.