Electrochemical Sensing of Pharmaceuticals Using Metal–Organic Framework-Modified Screen-Printed Electrodes: Fabrication, Mechanisms, and Machine Learning Perspectives

Pharmaceutical residues in environmental and biological matrices require analytical methods that are both sensitive and portable. Chromatographic techniques struggle to deliver this combination outside a laboratory setting. Screen-printed electrodes (SPEs) meet the portability requirement, but bare SPE surfaces offer limited sensitivity and selectivity on their own. Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), with high surface area and tunable porosity, are increasingly used to modify SPEs for this purpose. However, their intrinsically poor conductivity usually requires pairing with a carbon or metal nanomaterial. This review synthesizes the literature on MOF-modified SPEs specifically for pharmaceutical analysis, which has not previously been treated as a distinct topic. It examines three principal fabrication routes, drop casting, in-situ growth, and printing-based deposition (ink mixing and inkjet printing), and classifies the resulting materials by metal chemistry into five groups spanning copper-based, bimetallic, MIL- and UiO-series, and MOF-derived frameworks. Reported detection limits across antibiotics, neuropsychiatric and analgesic drugs, chronic disease medications, and anticancer agents span about seven orders of magnitude, from low-micromolar electrocatalytic sensors to picomolar recognition-element-based platforms, a gap this review traces directly to sensing mechanisms. The emerging use of machine learning (ML) for MOF screening and voltammetric signal interpretation is also assessed, and the review closes by identifying reproducibility, inconsistent structural reporting, and the absence of interpretable, transferable models as the field’s principal remaining barriers.