Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jelechem Simultaneous determination of doxorubicin and dasatinib as two breast anticancer drugs uses an amplified sensor with ionic liquid and ZnO nanoparticle Seyed A.R. Alavi-Tabari a , Mohammad A. Khalilzadeh a, ⁎ , Hassan Karimi-Maleh b, ⁎ a Department of Chemistry, Qaemshahr Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qaemshahr, Iran b Department of Chemical Engineering, Laboratory of Nanotechnology, Quchan University of Technology, Quchan, Islamic Republic of Iran ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Doxorubicin Dasatinib ZnO nanoparticle 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate ABSTRACT The voltammetric behavior of doxorubicin at a ZnO nanoparticle/1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetra- fluoroborate modified carbon paste electrode (ZnO-NPs/BMTFB/CPE) has been investigated. For the goal, ZnO- NPs were biosynthesized by celery extract in aqueous solution. The ZnO-NPs/BMTFB/CPE exhibits a good promoting effect on the oxidation response of doxorubicin. After optimization of pH condition, ZnO-NPs/ BMTFB/CPE exhibits two separated oxidation signals for simultaneous analysis of doxorubicin and dasatinib with ΔE ~300 mV. The oxidation currents showed linear relation with doxorubicin or dasatinib concentration in the ranges of 0.07–500 μM and 1.0–1200 μM, respectively. We detected limit of detection 9.0 nM and 0.5 μM for doxorubicin and dasatinib, respectively. The ZnO-NPs/BMTFB/CPE has been applied to the analysis of doxor- ubicin and dasatinib in injection and pharmaceutical serum samples. 1. Introduction Cancer is a serious disease and an important cause of mortality in humans from many years ago. Many attempts have been made to treat cancer by scientist. Application of anticancer drugs in chemotherapy is the main way for treatment of cancer. Doxorubicin can be interferes with the growth and spread of cancer cells and helps to treatment of cancer and especially breast cancer. The pain, nausea or vomiting, low blood counts, hair loss and mouth sores are the main side effect of doxorubicin in human body. Dasatinib was suggested as a new therapy for breast cancer. This anticancer drug suggested for other cancer therapy such as prostate and lung cancer. The combination of dastinib and doxorubicin can be useful for treatment of breast cancer [1]. Due to high side effects, the determination of dastinib and doxorubicin in human body is very important for control level of them in human blood and urine. Although some analytical methods were reported determi- nation of doxorubicin or dastinib in blood and urine samples, but there are not any analytical methods for simultaneously determination of these two anticancer drugs [2–6]. According to published papers, doxorubicin and dastinib are two electro-active anticancer drugs with high overvoltage potential and can be determined by electrochemical sensors [3,7–9]. Due to low oxidation signal and high oxidation overpotential, the low-level analysis of these anticancer drugs is very difficult. Therefore, applications of modified electrodes are necessary for analysis of these anticancer drugs in low- level concentration. The nano-materials such as metals and their oxides and carbon materials with unique nanostructure or their composites display exceptional performance like excellent electrocatalytic ability, large specific surface area, strong surface reactivity, high conductivity, the improvement of overpotentials, and the enhancement of response signal for the fabrication of electrochemical nanosensors or nanobio- composite [10–17]. According to previous reported for fabrication of modified electrode, nanomaterials and room temperature ionic liquids are good choices for fabrication of highly sensitive voltammetric sen- sors [18–30]. Also, the previous studies showed that ZnO nanoparticles coupled with ionic liquids can be useful for fabrication of electro- chemical sensors [31–33]. Due to high-performance ability of electro-analytical sensors for determination of electro-active materials according to recently pub- lished papers [32,34–39] and recently our group trying for fabrication of modified electrochemical sensors [40–43], we selected this type of sensors for simultaneous determination of doxorubicin or dastinib in blood and urine samples. Therefore, we fabricated ZnO-NPs/BMTFB/ CPE as a new electrochemical tool for voltammetric determination of doxorubicin in the presence of dastinib. The ZnO-NPs/BMTFB/CPE showed high performance ability for analysis of doxorubicin or dastinib https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jelechem.2018.01.034 Received 26 December 2017; Received in revised form 18 January 2018; Accepted 19 January 2018 ⁎ Corresponding authors. E-mail addresses: mkhalil3@ncsu.edu (M.A. Khalilzadeh), h.karimi.maleh@gmail.com (H. Karimi-Maleh). Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry 811 (2018) 84–88 1572-6657/ © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T