Cold atmospheric plasma treated 3D printed polylactic acid film; application in thin film solid phase microextraction of anticancer drugs

Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors (TKIs) represent a pharmacological category of targeted therapeutics deployed for the treatment of malignant pathologies. Considering the side effects of this class of drugs for humans, therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) becomes important. Here, a novel and specific methodology is introduced for the quantification of two TKIs (dasatinib and erlotinib) in human plasma samples. Furthermore, this study investigates the successful application of 3D printer technology in analytical sample preparation methods. Employing a fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer and polylactic acid (PLA) filament, adsorbent films were designed and produced to be utilized in thin film microextraction. The 3D printed polylactic acid film surface was modified using cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) as a fast, clean and dry surface modification method with low consumption of chemicals and energy. Subsequently, FESEM, AFM, ATR-FTIR, and WCA analysis studies were employed to effectively assess the efficacy of the plasma surface modification method for the 3D printed films. After the optimization of the plasma modification and extraction methods, human plasma samples were studied for the effectiveness of the aforementioned approach. So, the selected 3D printed films with excellent microextraction efficiency have been found to be effective in sample preparation of biological samples. The linear dynamic range (LDR), limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) were obtained 0.10-20 mu gL(-1), 0.03 mu gL(- 1)and 0.1 mu gL(-1) for dasatinib and 1.0-500 mu gL(-1), 0.3 mu gL(-1), and 1 mu gL(-1) for erlotinib. The results obtained indicate that the developed method proves to be successful in the effective separation of anticancer drugs.