Active pharmaceutical ingredient surface area

Many plants, used as spices or flavor ingredients, are preserved by drying and are ideal matrices for SFE. Once ground to a powder, they have a large surface area and are highly permeable, leading to rapid and efficient extractions. Interest in SFE of plants has principally been for the isolation of essential oils, but recently SFE has also been used to obtain pharmaceutically active compounds. The extraction of the sesquiterpene lactone parthenolide (Fig. 5) from feverfew plants has been described by Smith (30) and Smith and Burford (31). SFE was compared with steam distillation and solvent extraction. While SFE extracted the less-volatile lactones and parthenolide, the steam distillation extracted the volatile terpenes. SFE resulted in incomplete extraction compared... 

---