Process control, pharmaceuticals

Industrially, small molecules are interesting to measure for the purpose of process control, for example during pharmaceutical production. MIPs can be made chirally selective, which means that they can discriminate between molecules that are mirror images of each other. Often it is only one of the mirror images that is useful as a drug, the other molecule can even be dangerous (remember the Neurosedyn scandal?). During production it is difficult to produce only one of the molecules. With a sensor system containing chirally selective MIPs, mirror image molecules can be detected and monitored which is important in some production steps.

In some applications a MIP based sensor system can increase production yield by monitoring key molecules and aiding the optimization of production parameters.