Enantiopure drugs, large-scale separations

The interests of SMB for performing large-scale separations of enantiopure drugs has been recognized (very short development time, extremely high probability of success, and attractive purification cost) [68]. Several pharmaceutical and fine chemical companies have already developed SMB processes. However, because of strong confidentiality constraints, public information is limited, and some of the major announcements are summarized below ... 

Preparative chromatography has been used for chiral separations for years, but examples of multi-kg separations (and hence larger ones) were rare until recently. The development of SMB techniques (both hardware and simulation software) has made major breakthroughs in this field. The ability of SMB as a development tool has allowed the pharmaceutical manufacturer to obtain kilo grams quantities of enantiopure drug substances as well benefit from the economics of large-scale production. 

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