Article
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Benzylfentanyl as a Surrogate Template for Fentanyl-Selective Imprinted Polymers
Version 1
: Received: 1 August 2023 / Approved: 2 August 2023 / Online: 2 August 2023 (09:53:58 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Hasan, M.R.; Spivak, D.A. Benzylfentanyl as a Surrogate Template for Fentanyl-Selective Imprinted Polymers. Polymers 2023, 15, 3669. Hasan, M.R.; Spivak, D.A. Benzylfentanyl as a Surrogate Template for Fentanyl-Selective Imprinted Polymers. Polymers 2023, 15, 3669.
Abstract
The illicit use of fentanyl has led to hundreds of thousands of opioid-related deaths worldwide. Therefore, the detection of fentanyl by law enforcement and recreational users is of utmost importance. However, current detection methods are expensive, time-consuming, require special storage conditions and necessitate complex instrumentation that is generally unportable and requires skilled personnel to operate. An alternative approach would be using molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) as the recognition component of a handheld sensor, testing strip, or color-based assay. In this work, a molecularly imprinted polymer was made by using methacrylic acid (MAA) and ethyleneglycol dimethacrylate (EGDMA) as the functional monomer and cross-linking monomer respectively, and benzylfentanyl (Bfen) as the template. The use of benzylfentanyl is advantageous because it closely resembles the structure of fentanyl but does not have any physiological effects as a narcotic. Important studies herein determined the optimum ratio of the template:functional monomer, with subsequent evaluations of selectivity versus the commonly encountered narcotics such as heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. The data obtained from the HPLC analysis showed that the Bfen-MIP was successful in selectively binding the template and actual fentanyl, better than other common narcotics.
Keywords
fentanyl, benzylfentanyl; molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP); narcotics; molecular recognition
Subject
Chemistry and Materials Science, Polymers and Plastics
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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