Metal Scavengers

In recent years, the time pressure to quickly bring new drugs to market has increased the frequency of use of metal catalysts, leading to an increase of residual metals in active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) or intermediates. There are a lot of classical techniques such as chromatography, distillation, ultrafiltration, recrystallisation and carbon adsorption, which can be used to purify APIs or intermediates. However, these techniques have many disadvantages. For example, chromatography is effective, but very expensive, consumes large quantities of solvents (therefore requires further downstream processing) and is not suitable for large scale operation. On top of that, as regulations tighten, these techniques are unable to meet the purity requirements for APIs or intermediates. To address these limitations, Alfa Chemistry has developed metal scavengers for removing different metal catalysts from APIs or intermediates to sub-ppm levels. If you need help, please contact us.

Advantages of Metal Scavengers

Compared to classical purification techniques of APIs or intermediates, metal scavengers have a number of advantages, including but not limited to the following.

• The raw materials of metal scavengers are cheap, which reduces the cost of manufacturing or developing drugs.
• Metal scavengers rarely cause APIs or intermediates losses, which reduces economic losses during drug production.
• The purification efficiency of metal scavengers is high, which is beneficial to shorten the production cycle of drugs.