Background: The development of innovative approaches in drug analysis is a challenging task for medicine, pharmacy, and engineering sciences. For instance, the requirement of proper dosage forms in releasing active ingredients is crucial. It is essential to analyze drugs in biological liquids for early diagnosis and treatment purposes. Drug analysis is also of great importance to control the quality of pharmaceutical products, test their efficacy, and develop novel drug formulation. The present review is aimed to highlight the most recent spectrophotometric approaches applied to analyze various classes of drugs in biological media and/or dosage forms.

Methods: Direct and derivative UV/UV-Vis spectrophotometry and a combination of various techniques with spectrophotometry, such as injection analysis and chemometrics, have most widely been applied in the analysis of dosage forms. In addition, emerging technologies, such as UV imaging allows to obtain the distribution of drug concentration in time-resolved 2D images based on UV light absorption, utilization of nanotechnology, self-assembled nanomaterials, and aptamer-based nanoparticles have gained interests to investigate drug assays and to quantify the proper drug release.

Results: Due to their high versatility, ease of application, low cost, and fast response, spectrophotometric methods are one of the most preferable methods providing high accuracy and precision with a wide linear range in drug analysis.

Conclusion: Selected examples demonstrating the applicability of spectrophotometric methods in pharmaceutical assays in this review might contribute to the overall importance of the analytical test used in modern pharmaceutical analysis.

背景：药物分析创新方法的开发对于医学、药学和工程科学来说是一项具有挑战性的任务。例如，在释放活性成分时对适当剂型的要求是至关重要的。为了早期诊断和治疗目的，分析生物液体中的药物是必不可少的。药物分析对于控制医药产品的质量、测试其功效和开发新的药物配方也非常重要。本综述旨在强调用于分析生物介质和/或剂型中各类药物的最新分光光度法。

方法：直接和衍生的 UV/UV-Vis 分光光度法以及各种技术与分光光度法的结合，如注射分析和化学计量学，在剂型分析中得到了最广泛的应用。此外，新兴技术，如紫外成像允许基于紫外光吸收、纳米技术的利用、自组装纳米材料和基于适配体的纳米粒子在时间分辨的二维图像中获得药物浓度的分布，从而引起人们对药物研究的兴趣。化验并量化适当的药物释放。

结果：分光光度法具有通用性强、应用方便、成本低和响应快等优点，是药物分析中最优选的方法之一，可提供高精度和宽线性范围的药物分析。

结论：本综述中证明分光光度法在药物分析中的适用性的选定示例可能有助于现代药物分析中使用的分析测试的整体重要性。