Poloxamer-based aqueous biphasic systems in designing an integrated extraction platform for the valorization of pharmaceutical waste

Barcoding drug information to recycle unwanted household pharmaceuticals: a review

“…Waste pharmaceuticals have been largely overlooked as a vast source of valuable chemical compounds. A recent study reported that most of the active ingredients in commonly discarded medicines continue to be stable for many years after their expiration dates printed on product labels (Marić et al 2021 ). Most pharmaceutical ingredients have very high purities, are costly to make, and belong to a group of high-value chemicals if recovered.…”

“…However, these operations have the common drawbacks associated with the use of volatile and toxic organic solvents. New separation technologies based on aqueous biphasic systems were also investigated in recent research and employed to separate active ingredients from pharmaceutical solids and further to fractionate recovered compounds (Marić et al 2021 ). Recently, Pratama et al ( 2020 ) demonstrated the proof of concept of drug recycling by recovering active ingredients from unused tablets and capsules.…”

Advances Brought by Hydrophilic Ionic Liquids in Fields Involving Pharmaceuticals

“…As in the previous section, IL-based ABS and/or aqueous solutions of ILs have been investigated in the separation and purification of pharmaceuticals. IL-based ABS design should consider water-stable [ 4 , 8 , 12 , 168 ] and, whenever possible, more benign ILs [ 22 , 38 , 169 , 170 ], combined with various phase-forming agents, such as salts [ 28 , 120 , 126 , 171 , 172 ], polymers [ 39 , 172 , 173 , 174 , 175 ], surfactants [ 176 ], amino acids [ 177 ] and polar organic solvents [ 178 , 179 ]. Among these, Shahriari et al [ 40 ] reported, for the first time, the existence of ABS composed of cholinium-based ILs and the inorganic salt K 3 PO 4 , followed by their application to separate tetracycline and its hydrochloride salt.…”

“…Under this scenario, the best conditions were then used to extract paracetamol from expired pills (considered as standard materials in several industries), where complete extraction efficiencies of the API were achieved using ABS composed of [N 2222 ]Br or [N 4444 ]Br + K 2 CO 3 or C 6 H 5 K 3 O 7 /C 6 H 8 O 7 at pH ≈ 7. A different strategy to valorize unused and outdated medicines was recently proposed by Dimitrijević and coworkers [ 175 ], who took full advantage of the distinct capacity of polymer-salt- and polymer-IL-based ABS to extract active pharmaceutical ingredients (viz., acetaminophen, caffeine, and theophylline). Polymer-C 6 H 5 Na 3 O 7 -based systems showed a higher extraction aptitude, being firstly used to recover all three compounds, whereas the polymer-[C 4 C 1 im]Cl-based system was used for fractionation purposes.…”

“…The polymer-rich phase enriched in the target products was further used to prepare the polymer-[C 4 C 1 im]Cl-based system aiming the separation of caffeine and acetaminophen present in the same pharmaceutical formulation. Although no complete separation was achieved (recovery efficiencies of 70.49% and 65.70% for acetaminophen and caffeine, respectively), the proposed integrated process allowed to remove excipients present in the pills [ 175 ]. It should be finally underlined that the authors used an amphiphilic copolymer belonging to the Pluronics ® family (Pluronic PE 6200), which bears ethylene oxide (hydrophilic) and propylene oxide (hydrophobic) units organized in a triblock structure.…”