Abstract

The physicochemical properties of pharmaceuticals such as acid dissociation constant (pK), octanol-water partition coefficient (logP), protein binding constant, inclusion complex constant with cyclodextrin (CD), and selfassociation are very important in drug design, candidate selection, and drug delivery. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a simple, versatile, automated, and powerful separation technique and widely applied in physicochemical profiling for pharmaceuticals. It has advantages over traditional potentiometric, spectrophotometric, chromatographic, and other methods, as CE requires very small amounts of sample and can measure compounds with impurities and low aqueous solubility. Principles and applications of CE in profiling various physicochemical properties will be reviewed.

Keywords: capillary electrophoresis, acid dissociation constant, octanol-water partition coefficient, drug-protein binding, inclusion complex constant, self-association