What are metal scavengers?

> back to the scavengers FAQ page

Metal scavengers are functionalized silica gels designed to react and bind excess metal complexes.

In recent years, the time pressure associated with quickly bringing candidate drugs to market has increased the number of transition metal-catalyzed reactions being transferred from lead optimization to early scale-up. The removal of post-reactions metal residues has become a major issue in the pharmaceutical industry.

Purification of APIs from residual metal catalyst by traditional methods (chromatography, activated carbon, distillation, etc.) often leads to problems such as high costs, time loss, low efficiency, and reduced API yields.

Traditional purification means are good but not great:

• Crystallization involves a compound exposed for a long time to high temperatures, increasing the risk for thermal degradation. It is expensive, and total recovery is hard to achieve.
• Solvent Extraction is long, implies large volumes of solvents, often implies colored and viscous extracts, and is hardly optimizable.
• Chromatography is effective but also very expensive, consumes large quantities of solvents (hence requiring further downstream processing) and poorly suitable for large scale operations.

Silica-based metal scavengers have been proven to be the purification method of choice over all other methods and several companies from various industries use them. With the silica matrix advantages over polymers (no swelling, more general solvent compatibility, higher mechanical and thermal stabilities, applications easily scalables and products available in different formats, i.e. SPE, flash cartridges, bulk, etc.) silica metal scavengers are the solution for metal removal without contamination of drug candidates.

Learn more:

• SiliaMetS Metal Scavengers
• SiliaMetS Metal Scavengers portfolio
• SiliCycle Scavenging Solutions (metal and organic scavengers)
• Resources about our Scavenging Solutions