Physicochemical Properties of Drugs
Physicochemical properties are a key determinant of a drug’s pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic profile, and essential to increasing the success rate of drug candidates within the preclinical development process.
Some known poor physicochemical properties of Drugs that can impact DMPK and/or drug safety include:
- Poor solubility, chemical stability or permeability resulting in reduced GI tract absorption leading to decreased oral bioavailability. This can impact on efficiency or on achieving sufficient high exposures in support of preclinical safety assessment studies.
- High lipophilicity has been linked with high plasma protein binding, promiscuous binding and off-target toxicity.
The team at Sygnature recognises the importance of designing in good physicochemical properties for any lead series. Designing sufficiently drug-like compounds is of pivotal importance to avoid time-consuming and expensive ADME problems during preclinical and clinical development.
Predicting physicochemical properties of drugs
Our computational chemistry group can predict physicochemical properties of drugs that are useful for the design of appropriate hit expansion libraries and during lead optimisation. The profiling of physicochemical properties of compounds from your different chemical series is usually performed within hit to lead or lead optimisation phases of discovery to identify hit clusters with properties to help guide series selection and/or series optimisation.
At Sygnature we offer state-of-the-art determination of the following physicochemical parameters: