Preparative Separation of High-Purity Dihydroartemisinic Acid from Artemisinin Production Waste by Combined Chromatography

Abstract

In order to make full use of artemisinin production waste and thus to reduce the production cost of artemisinin, we developed an efficient and scalable method to isolate high-purity dihydroartemisinic acid from artemisinin production waste by combining anion-exchange resin with silica-gel column chromatography. The adsorption and desorption characteristics of dihydroartemisinic acid on 10 types of anion-exchange resin were investigated, and the results showed that the 717 anion-exchange resin exhibited the highest capacity of adsorption and desorption to dihydroartemisinic acid. Adsorption isotherms were established for the 717 anion-exchange resin and they fitted well with both Langmuir and Freundlich model. Dynamic adsorption and desorption properties of 717 anion-exchange resin were characterized to optimize the chromatographic conditions. Subsequently, the silica-gel column chromatography was performed and dihydroartemisinic acid with a purity of up to 98% (w/w) was obtained. Finally, the scale-up experiments validated the preparative separation of high-purity dihydroartemisinic acid from industrial waste developed in the present work. This work presented for the first time an isolation of dihydroartemisinic acid with a purity of 98% from Artemisia annua (A. annua) by-product, which adds more value to this crop and has the potential to lower the prices of anti-malarial drugs.