Potential of immobilized artificial membrane chromatography for lipophilicity determination of arylpropionic acid non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

Molecular lipophilicity can be expressed by logP or more conveniently by logk, i.e. determined by the traditional shake-flask technique or by liquid chromatography. The logk of 11 arylpropionic non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) was determined at pH 7.4 of the eluent using two stationary phases i.e. octadecylsilane phase and an immobilized artificial membrane (IAM.PC.MG) packing. The chromatographic retention factors extrapolated to 100% aqueous phase (logk(wODS) and logk(wIAM)) were correlated with n-octanol/water lipophilicity parameters (logP) and with n-octanol/water partition coefficients corrected for ionization at pH 7.4 (logD7.4). In this series of compounds, significant linear correlations (r>0.94) between the chromatographic parameters (logk(wIAM)) and the reference lipophilicity data (logP and logD7.4) were described. Moreover, regression analysis between the lipophilicity parameters and some pharmacokinetic data for the drugs under study were performed. The logk(wIAM) parameter over n-octanol/water partition data seems to provide a good model to obtain lipophilicity parameters of arylpropionic acid NSAIDs for quantitative structure-activity relationships studies.