In the last few years, there has been a resurgence of supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), which has been stimulated by the introduction of a new generation of instruments and columns from the main providers of chromatographic instrumentation, that are strongly committed to advancing the technology. The known limitations of SFC, such as weak UV sensitivity, limited reliability and poor quantitative performance have been mostly tackled with these advanced instruments. In addition, due to the obvious benefits of SFC in terms of kinetic performance and its complementarity to LC, advanced packed-column SFC represents today an additional strategy in the toolbox of the analytical scientist, which may be particularly interesting in pharmaceutical analysis. In the present review, the instrumentation and experimental conditions (i.e. stationary phase chemistry and dimensions, mobile phase nature, pressure and temperature) to perform "advanced SFC" are discussed. The applicability of SFC in pharmaceutical analysis, including the determination of drugs in formulations and biofluids is critically discussed.

Department of Analytical Chemistry Faculty of Pharmacy Charles University Prague Heyrovského 1203 500 05 Hradec Králové Czech Republic

Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research Global Discovery Chemistry WKL 122 P 25 Postfach CH 4002 Basel Switzerland

School of Pharmaceutical Sciences University of Geneva University of Lausanne Boulevard d'Yvoy 20 1211 Geneva 4 Switzerland

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