Supercritical fluids chromatography for impregnation optimization

Supercritical impregnation technique of polymeric matrix is going to have a very high interest in the pharmaceutical field. The possibility to obtain a final drug release product totally uncontaminated by organic solvents is a noticeable progress for the pharmaceutical factories. Two main steps are involved in the impregnation studies, the knowledge of the behavior of the drug/supercritical medium system, and the tedious and time consuming impregnation experiments for the choice of the conditions and for the choice of the proper matrix to be impregnated. In this work, an example of solubility study on anti inflammatory drug in supercritical carbon dioxide and in CO2/cosolvent mixtures, by a dynamic method is reported, moreover supercritical fluid (SF) chromatography technique is proposed as a tool which can give useful information on impregnation experiments in very short times. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.