Digoxin as a glycosylated steroid-like therapeutic drug: Recent advances in the clinical pharmacology and bioassays of pharmaceutical compounds

Digoxin is cardiac glycosylated steroid like drug which is the fifth most commonly prescribed in US. Since the health of human population is largely determined by pharmacy they utilized, toxicity and side effects of pharmaceutics can put the safety of people in jeopardy and lead to some devastating impacts. Therefore, it is essential to detect and monitor small molecules like digoxin more meticulously. Although digoxin has positive inotropic and batmotropic impact on heart muscle, it has also negative chronotropic and dromotropic effect. The prescription dose of this drug is 1−2 ng/ml and more than 2.8 ng/ml of this medication cause toxicity. Hence, there is small variation between therapeutic and toxic dosage of digoxin. Abundant conventional methods have been introduced for digoxin monitoring such Liquid chromatography (LC), LC–MS, HPLC. However, they suffer expensive equipment, long lasting procedure and high limit of detection. Hence, various advance immunosorbent, biosensors and aptasensors have been introduced. The purpose of this review is limited to pointing convention methods drawbacks and introducing novel digoxin enzyme-linked or non-enzymatic immunosorbent assays, and biosensors paying special attention to their basic strategies and detection abilities. Future trends in Bio and immune sensors used for onset monitoring and detection of digoxin are also highlighted.