Invited lecture at the 8th Meeting on Supercritical Fluids (Bordeaux-2002) Pharmaceutical applications of Supercritical Fluids

The pharmaceutical industry is facing many challenges: Invention of new drugs and improvement of the therapeutic drug efficacy against numerous pathologies, meanwhile supporting a continuous effort to move to environment-friendly processes and reducing the use of potentially harmful solvents. As Nature is almost an unlimited source of active substances, a great interest is paid to concentrate them or to remove undesired compounds, using mainly extraction with organic solvents or water or ethanol/water mixtures, depending on the polarity of the targeted molecules. However, for the past three decades, important R&D works about supercritical fluid technology have been dedicated to natural products processing, leading to some very well-known applications to food products like coffee and tea decaffeination or hops resins extraction, but also to manufacturing phytopharmaceuticals/nutraceuticals; in fact, carbon dioxide, used pure or added with ethanol, presents the definitive advantages to be a « green », abundant and cheap solvent perfectly adequate to process food or pharmaceutical products from natural feedstocks at a temperature near to ambient, although it does require a sophisticated equipment designed for high pressure operation, generally up to 300 or 350 bar