Recognizing that approximately 50% of commercial pharmaceuticals are salts, ionic liquid forms of a number of pharmaceuticals have been investigated. Combining a pharmaceutically active cation with a pharmaceutically active anion leads to a Dual Active ionic liquid in which the actions of two drugs are combined.
ILs can extract specific compounds from plants for pharmaceutical, nutritional and cosmetic applications, such as the antimalarial drug artemisinin from the plant Artemisia annua.