Lipophilicity is possibly the most important physicochemical parameter for any potential drug candidate. Lipophilicity measurements are valuable for understanding how drugs are dissolved in plasma and other aqueous biological fluids. Lipophilicity is typically accessed as the distribution of the tested compound between two solvents - typically non-aqueous organic (1-octanol) and aqueous (pH-buffered water), and then LogP is expressed as a Log of the concentration ratio between two phases. LogP is widely used in cheminformatics and is a component of Lipinski’s “rule of five”, which is a golden standard to evaluate a drug-likeness of a compound. According to this rule, the successful drug candidate should possess LogP value not greater than 5.
LogD is a distribution coefficient widely used to measure the lipophilicity of ionizable compounds, where the partition is a function of the pH.
For nonionizable compounds LogP = LogD throughout pH range, whereas for ionizable compounds LogD takes into account the partition of both ionized and non-ionized forms. LogD is more convenient for practical measurements, as it takes into account solution pH, which is important for the analysis of the drug candidate properties in various biological media with different pH values. The shake flask method is considered the gold standard technique for determining log D.