[stm278]

I hope this is the correct board to post this question in

My job often requires me to clean glass from broken pharmaceutical vials. This includes cleaning away residue of drug product and dissolving the lyo cakes. One product that I deal with has a lyo cake that is hygroscopic and will shrivel and condense if left exposed to open air for a couple days. This makes the cake impossible to dissolve in water or 10% w/v Alconox (the common detergent we have in the lab). This leads to leaving the cake soaking overnight, and needing to grind it through a sieve. The drug product mainly consists of phospholipid bilayers and sucrose. I'm not sure why exposing it air makes the lyo cake impossible to dissolve, but it does.

Does anyone have any ideas of lab or household detergents that might be useful to help quickly dissolve this lyo cake? I have experimented with using Triton x-100, and that works pretty decently, but I figured I would ask around to see if there might be better options.

[rolnor]

NaOH?

[jeffmoonchop]

Seems strange that something hygroscopic wouldn't dissolve in water. I work with Lyo cakes using the components you mentioned. One thing I can think of is that the lipids are producing a layer on the outside of the cake as the outer sugar is melted back, so using a more organic solvent might dissolve them. Try ethanol, but I know phospholipids can take a while to dissolve in ethanol, but would do more so than water. Triton breaks apart the lipids, but the combination of water and triton might not work as well as ethanol.