This work aimed to develop a voltammetric method for Irbesartan detection.

Irbesartan is a drug prescribed to treat hypertension and high blood pressure. Recent studies associated sartans with several forms of cancer, making removing this class of substances from the environment a high priority. The EU has categorized drugs as emerging pollutants, and they can be more potent than other substances because they were designed to operate at low concentrations. Thus, effective and sensitive methods to determine irbesartan selectively and accurately in environmental samples are necessary. MIPs have already been used to remove pollutants from complex matrixes, so they were also chosen for this work. In particular, MIP-polyacrylate was used to functionalize the graphite working electrode of screen-printed cells (SPCs), aiming to develop a voltammetric method for Irbesartan sensing. The MIP’s prepolymeric mixture was drop coated on the working electrode, and polymerization was carried out in an oven at 70°C overnight. The electrochemical technique used to quantify Irbesartan is the square wave voltammetry (SWV); the experiments were carried out in acetate buffer at pH 5.5. The calibration curve was obtained by plotting current intensity (μA) versus Irbesartan concentration only after determining the best parameters with an Experimental Design. The procedure was replicated with different SPCs obtaining similar results, highlighting good reproducibility. The MIP-based electrodes were also applied to determine Irbesartan in fortified tap water samples, obtaining high recovery percentages. Since the good results, the electrochemical methods based on MIP-functionalized screen-printed electrodes are promising for quantifying Irbesartan at a trace level.