Recent achievements and future challenges in supercritical fluid chromatography for the enantioselective separation of chiral pharmaceuticals

During the last years, supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) has attracted a continuously growing number of users. Thanks to the introduction of state-of-the-art equipment, this technique has allowed to run three-to-five times faster separations than in high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) on columns packed with particles of comparable dimension, at lower pressure drops and without loss of efficiency. Thanks to its high versatility, its high-throughput screening capability, and “green” character of the mobile phase, SFC has become particularly attractive for the separation of chiral drugs in pharmaceutical industries. In this review, we will consider the latest applications of SFC for the analysis of compounds of pharmaceutical interest and/or with biological activity essentially covering main achievements of the last 3 years. We also focus on some very recent, remarkable applications of SFC in ultrafast enantioseparations on chiral columns of the latest generation. Technical improvements needed on commercial equipment to increase the competitiveness of SFC towards highly efficient enantioseparations are discussed.