Evidence Hub

Reliable Clinical Serum Analysis with Reusable Electrochemical Sensor: Toward Point-of-Care Measurement of the Antipsychotic Medication Clozapine

Mijeong Kang, Eunkyoung Kim, Thomas E. Winkler, G. Banis, Yi Liu, Christopher Kitchen, D. Kelly, R. Ghodssi et al.

Biosensors & bioelectronics, 2017

39 citations

Abstract

Clozapine is one of the most promising medications for managing schizophrenia but it is under-utilized because of the challenges of maintaining serum levels in a safe therapeutic range (1–3 μM). Timely measurement of serum clozapine levels has been identified as a barrier to the broader use of clozapine, which is however challenging due to the complexity of serum samples. We demonstrate a robust and reusable electrochemical sensor with graphene-chitosan composite for rapidly measuring serum levels of clozapine. Our electrochemical measurements in clinical serum from clozapine-treated and clozapine-untreated schizophrenia groups are well correlated to centralized laboratory analysis for the readily detected uric acid and for the clozapine which is present at 100-fold lower concentration. The benefits of our electrochemical measurement approach for serum clozapine monitoring are: (i) rapid measurement (≈ 20 min) without serum pretreatment; (ii) appropriate selectivity and sensitivity (limit of detection 0.7 μM); (iii) reusability of an electrode over several weeks; and (iv) rapid reliability testing to detect common error-causing problems. This simple and rapid electrochemical approach for serum clozapine measurements should provide clinicians with the timely point-of-care information required to adjust dosages and personalize the management of schizophrenia.

Read the paper

Related studies

Go deeper in Evidence Hub

Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.

Open this study Sign up free