Supercritical fluid technology: a promising approach in pharmaceutical research

Abstract

Supercritical fluids possess the unique properties of behaving like liquids and gases, above their critical point. Supercritical fluid technology has recently emerged as a green and novel technique for various processes such as solubility enhancement of poorly soluble drugs, plasticization of polymers, surface modification, nanosizing and nanocrystal modification, and chromatographic extraction. Research interest in this area has been fuelled because of the numerous advantages that the technology offers over the conventional methods. This work aims to review the merits, demerits, and various processes such as rapid expansion of supercritical solutions (RESS), particles from gas saturated solutions (PGSS), gas antisolvent process (GAS), supercritical antisolvent process (SAS) and polymerization induced phase separation (PIPS), that have enabled this technology to considerably raise the interest of researchers over the past two decades. An insight has been given into the numerous applications of this technology in pharmaceutical industry and the future challenges which must be appropriately dealt with to make it effective on a commercial scale.

Keywords::

• Rapid expansion of supercritical solutions
• gas antisolvent process
• supercritical antisolvent process
• polymerization-induced phase separation

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge their sincere thanks to All India Council of Technical Education, New Delhi for financial support.

Declaration of interest

Financial support was provided by All India Council of Technical Education, New Delhi, India. The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.