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 impreg nation experiments for the choice of the conditions and for the choice of t he 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 u seful information on impregnation experiments in very short times. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.