Multiwalled carbon nanotube modified glassy carbon electrode sensor for artemisinin as an anticancer drug

Artemisinin (ART) is a safe drug used to treat many illnesses, such as skin diseases and malaria [1] and is effective against a wide variety of cancers and brain tumors [2].Various methods have been developed to quantify artemisinin such as HPLC [3] which needs drivatization and increases sample preparation labor. Thermally labile artemisinin, cannot be directly determined by GC and needs derivatization [4]. But, the sensitivity of GC-FID is limited and the cost of GC–MS is high. The sensitive electron-capture detection also has some disadvantages, such as the prescence of millicurie amounts of radioactivity sealed in the detector.Artemisinin does not have any fluorescent chromophore group and so a fluorophore reagent should be used for its spectroflourimetric determination and a catalyst is needed for enhancing the sensitivity of the method which raises the cost[5]. By cyclic voltammetric method the reaction mechanism can be deduced and the procedure is more convenient. Carbon nanotubes modified electrodes as a charge- transfer promoter can catalyze the reduction of artemisinin without the need of any external catalyst or pretreatment processes. In this work a low cost, convenient and sensitive cyclic voltammetry technique based on electrocatalytic irreversible reduction of artemisinin on carbon nanotube modified glassy carbon electrode has been proposed for successfully evaluating of its quantity in human plasma and urine samples