Introduction: Lipophilicity, expressed as the octanol-water partition coefficient, constitutes the most important property in drug action, influencing both pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics processes as well as drug toxicity. On the other hand, biomimetic properties defined as the retention outcome on HPLC columns containing a biological relevant agent, provide a considerable advance for rapid experimental – based estimation of ADME properties in early drug discovery stages. Areas covered: This review highlights the paramount importance of lipophilicity in almost all aspects of drug action and safety. It outlines problems brought about by high lipophilicity and provides an overview of the drug-like metrics which incorporate lower limits or ranges of logP. The fundamental factors governing lipophilicity are compared to those involved in phospholipophilicity, assessed by Immobilized Artificial Membrane Chromatography (IAM). Finally, the contribution of biomimetic properties to assess plasma protein binding is evaluated. Expert opinion: Lipophilicity and biomimetic properties have important distinct and overlapping roles in supporting the drug discovery process. Lipophilicity is unique in early drug design for library screening and for the identification of the most promising compounds to start with, while biomimetic properties are useful for the experimentally-based evaluation of ADME properties for the synthesized novel compounds, supporting the prioritization of drug candidates and guiding further synthesis.

HPLC provides a user's friendly, rapid, and compound sparing methodology, which is successfully applied to determine drug lipophilicity. Under suitable chromatographic conditions isocratic and extrapolated retention factors correlate well with octanol‐water partition or distribution coefficients. The present review provides an overview of the stationary and mobile phases, which are preferably used for lipophilicity assessment mainly in the case of basic compounds. Difficulties raised by the interference of silanophilic interactions in the partition mechanism, and the ways proposed to face this problem are discussed. Attention has been given to the extrapolation procedure and the standardization of conditions to obtain 1∶1 correlation between extrapolated retention factors and logP or logD. Other chromatographic indices encoding information on the lipophilic behavior are briefly presented. A separate section refers to recent advances in IAM Chromatography, its similarities/dissimilarities with reversed phase HPLC and the octanol-water system, as well as its potential to mimic specific interactions with phospholipids.

Introduction: In multi-objective drug design, optimization gains importance, being upgraded to a discipline that attracts its own research. Current strategies are broadly classified into single – objective optimization (SOO) and multi-objective optimization (MOO). Areas covered: Starting with SOO and the ways used to incorporate multiple criteria into it, the present review focuses on MOO techniques, their comparison, advantages, and restrictions. Pareto analysis and the concept of dominance stand in the core of MOO. The Pareto front, Pareto ranking, and limitations of Pareto-based methods, due to high dimensions and data uncertainty, are outlined. Desirability functions and the weighted sum approaches are described as stand-alone techniques to transform the MOO problem to SOO or in combination with pareto analysis and evolutionary algorithms. Representative applications in different drug research areas are also discussed. Expert opinion: Despite their limitations, the use of combined MOO techniques, as well as being complementary to SOO or in conjunction with artificial intelligence, contributes dramatically to efficient drug design, assisting decisions and increasing success probabilities. For multi-target drug design, optimization is supported by network approaches, while applicability of MOO to other fields like drug technology or biological complexity opens new perspectives in the interrelated fields of medicinal chemistry and molecular biology.