Sterilization of corticosteroids for ocular and pulmonary delivery with supercritical carbon dioxide.

Glucocorticosteroids, a class of drugs widely used in the treatment of allergies, airways inflammation and inflammatory ocular diseases, are often difficult to sterilize due to their inherent sensibility to heat or irradiation induced degradation. Being often in form of suspension, obviously the final medicinal product cannot be sterilized by filtration. The effectiveness of supercritical CO2 (SC-CO2) based method for the sterilization of food and biomedical materials is well documented in the literature.