Pharmaceutical and forensic drug applications of chiral supercritical fluid chromatography

•Supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) in pharmaceutical analysis.•SFC has widespread applications in pharmaceutical analysis and enantioseparation.•Chiral stationary phases (CSPs) were developed for the separation of chiral drugs.•SFC offers advantages over HPLC (e.g., using smaller amounts of toxic solvents).•SFC meets the requirements of Green Analytical Chemistry rules.

The supercritical fluid is an excellent choice as the chromatographic mobile phase because it allows rapid separation with high efficiency and applications involving enantioresolution are common. Supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) is increasingly used for analytical, semi-preparative and preparative purification of chiral compounds, including production of enantiomers that are mainly encountered during drug development. SFC can be used as an alternative to HPLC for many drug substances, so it is gaining popularity in the pharmaceutical industry. The main advantages of SFC in separating chiral pharmaceuticals are: high speed, short analysis time, limited environmental impact and high efficiency. The reduction in the use of organic solvents has cost, health, and safety benefits. Due to these advantages, SFC fulfills all the requirements of Green Analytical Chemistry approaches.In this article, we present application of SFC as a tool for chiral separation of pharmaceuticals and drugs of abuse.