Manufacturing API from a natural, synthetic, or semi-synthetic base

Synthetic APIs are developed from chemical conversions in a lab. Natural APIs, on the other hand, are derived from plants or animals and then purified. Semi-synthetic options stand somewhere in between. They are extracted from natural sources but then biochemically converted into the final Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient API.

The three main groupings of active pharmaceutical ingredients, however, employ similar extraction methods. The intermediaries are extracted from raw materials in a reactor before passing through a series of filtering and centrifuges for isolation and purification. Depending on the finished products, API are milled or freeze-dried before packaging. Distillation is also a key process used in the manufacturing of APIs. The distillation process is used to purify and isolate the desired compound from a complex mixture of chemicals.