RP-HPLC Determination of Lipophilicity in Series of Corticosteroids

The adrenal cortex secretes hormones called corticosteroids, which are divided into: mineralocorticoids and glucocorticoids. They are used for the controlled treatment of various dermatological diseases, since they have shown good results. Lipophilicity is a physicochemical feature of a compound that describes its ability to dissolves in fats, oils and non-polar solvents such as hexane or toluene. For drugs it is very important property because it affects their pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and toxicology profile, ie solubility, absorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination, binding to plasma proteins and interaction with the receptor. The main method for determination of lipophilicity is extraction in two different solvents (n-octanol and water), but in this study, we used two different HPLC-UV methods for determination the correlation of this parameter vs retention time. The HPLC-UV manual injection apparatus was used during the study, using a ZORBAX Eclipse XDB-C18, 150 × 4.6 mm, 3.5 μm and Zorbax Phenyl, 250 × 4.6 mm, 5.0 µm columns, and corticosteroids: alclomethasone dipropionate, betamethasone dipropionate, dexamethasone, mometasone, mometasone furoate, hydrocortisone and clobetasole propionate. The results showed that both methods have excellent results in correlation of retention time vs ACD/LogP and retention time vs ClogP but method witch use ZORBAX Eclipse XDB-C18 column are better because of shorter analysis run time.