Estimating the Lipophilicity of Natural Products using a Polymeric Reversed Phase HPLC Method

The integration of physicochemical profiling screens such as Log P into natural products drug discovery programs is emerging as an approach to front-load drug-like properties of natural product libraries for high-throughput screening. In this study a fast-gradient HPLC method using a polystyrene-divinylbenzene PRP-1 column was developed to estimate the lipophilicity of marine natural products. An excellent correlation was found between the results of the experimental determined and the literature log P values for a diverse set of commercially available drugs using the PRP-1 column. The log P of a series of 24 marine natural products were evaluated using the new method and a good correlation was observed between the experimentally determined and software calculated log P values. Some discrepancies were observed between the measured value of log P and the software calculations of the natural products containing halogens atoms. The method is rapid, insensitive to impurities, and requires very little compound and is amenable for integration into a natural products drug discovery research program.