Preparation of monolithic molecularly imprinted polymer sol–gel packed tips for high-throughput bioanalysis: Extraction and quantification of l-tyrosine in human plasma and urine samples utilizing liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry

•In the present study, in situ monolithic molecularly imprinted polymer sol–gel packed tips (MMST) were prepared.•MMST showed good selectivity, stability, repeatability and high extraction recovery.•MMST was applied to determine lung cancer biomarker l-tyrosine (Tyr) from human plasma and urine samples utilizing LC-MS/MS.•The present method was validated according to the FDA guidelines.

In situ monolithic molecularly imprinted polymer sol–gel packed tips (MMSTs) were prepared and evaluated for the extraction of lung cancer biomarker l-tyrosine (Tyr) from human plasma and urine samples. Several extraction parameters such as the conditioning, washing and elution solutions, pH and time were investigated. The enrichment factor (EF) and extraction recovery (ER) were studied. MMST showed good selectivity and a high extraction recovery, and MMST as a sorbent showed good stability and repeatability. The method validation showed good regression correlation coefficients for plasma and urine samples (R2 ≥ 0.996) within the concentration range of 5–1000 and 1–1000 nmol L−1 in plasma and urine samples, respectively. The lower limits of quantification (LLOQ) in the plasma and urine samples were 5 and 1 nmol L−1, respectively. The between-batch precision for Tyr in plasma ranged from 1.0 to 6.0%, and in urine it was from 1.0 to 7.0%. The results show that the developed method has more facility, stability, durability and repeatability compared with previous similar methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study aimed at the selective separation of Tyr as a lung cancer biomarker by MMSTs from biological matrixes and detection by LC/MS/MS.