<p>Background: Remaining pharmaceutical compounds cause environmental pollution. Therefore, refining these compounds has become a major challenge. In this study, the function of eliminating Cefixime (CFX)&nbsp;using rice starch was evaluated under controlled conditions.</p> <p>Methods: Response Surface Methodology (RSM) was used to design, analyze, and optimize experiments, and the interaction between four variables including pH (3-9), rice starch dose (0&ndash;300 <em>mg/L</em>), CFX initial concentration (0&ndash;16 <em>mg/L</em>) and time (20&ndash;120 <em>min</em>) was investigated on CFX removal.</p> <p>Results: The optimum pH, starch dose, initial concentration and time were 4.5, 225 <em>mg/L</em>, 7.9 <em>mg/L</em> and 95 <em>min</em>, respectively. The maximum efficiency of CFX removal was 70.22%. According to RSM, this study follows a quadratic model (R2=0.954).</p> <p>Conclusion: Rice starch has been successful in removing CFX from the aqueous solution. Therefore, it is recommended to utilize this process to remove CFX from aqueous solutions.</p>