Pharmaceutical applications of supercritical carbon dioxide

The supercritical state of a fluid is intermediate between that of gases and liquids. Supercritical fluids exhibit some solvent power which is tunable in function of pressure and temperature. In the pharmaceutical field, supercritical carbon dioxide is by far the most commonly used fluid; of course, the first applications of supercritical fluids were the replacement of organic solvents in extraction processes; other applications appeared during the last twenty years: supercritical fluids are also used as eluents in chromatography, as solvents in organic synthesis or for the processing of solid dosage forms by drug micronization, by the production of nanospheres, of solid dispersions, of porous polymeric matrices containing different active substances. Supercritical carbon dioxide has been proposed for encapsulating both hydrophilic and hydrophobic drug substances into liposomes as well as for including different active substances into cyclodextrins. There are also future prospects for the use of pressurized carbon dioxide as a sterilizing agent.