A research team from the Center of Medical Physics and Technology under Hefei Institutes of Physical Science made use of the technology of solvent microextraction and surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) to realize the rapid and sensitive detection of illegally added antihypertensive and hypoglycemic drugs in a variety of health products.

The researchers demonstrated that SERS coupled with solvent micro-extraction technique (SME-SERS) enabled the rapid and simple determination of illegal drugs additives in health products. The mixture of CH₃OH-CHCl₃ could dissolve the health products with illegal drugs additives; however, after the addition of Ag colloids, CH₃OH could carry the drugs into Ag colloids to significantly improve the detective sensitivity and reproducibility, then further decreasing the possible interference.

More importantly, the SME-SERS were combined with multi-well plates to achieve the high-throughput and real-time detection of illegal additives in different health products with the level of 0.1 μg/mg for ATN, MET and PHE.

The designed method integrating advantages of microextraction and SERS illustrated a great potential for on-site high-throughput SERS analysis in various fields.

The study, published in Analyst, was supported by the National Major Scientific and Technological Special Project for "Significant New Drugs Development", Nature Science Research Project of Anhui Province, and the National Science Foundation of China.  

Schematic illustration of SME-SERS in-situ detection of illegal drug additives in health products. Inset show the optical image of Ag colloids distributed in the CHCl₃ surface in 96-well plates. (Image by WANG Yongtao)