Role of supercritical fluids in the pharmaceutical research - A review

Supercritical fluids have been recognized as having great potential in the pharmaceutical research. They offer exiting opportunities to produce or modify pharmaceutical substances. They are of more interest because of their special behavior. They have both gas and liquid like properties and therefore their solvating power can be controlled by changing the pressure and temperature. They are applied to recover active substances from a mixture, either a natural raw materials or intermediates from a chemical reaction, for generation of micro and nano particles, for coating of particles, for chemical reactions as reactant or solvent and also for the recovery of organic solvents. They can be used in the enantio-selective synthesis of bioactive compounds, enzyme-mediated reactions and in designing the stable protein formulations. Applications of supercritical fluid technologies are vividly discussed in this review.