Analysis and Treatment of Emerging Polar Contaminants

Two major classes of polar compounds have recently become a major focus as sources of contamination of water systems. Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) enter water through wastewater streams, and many of these compounds survive current wastewater treatment processes. High production volume chemicals (HPVCs), defined as chemicals produced in excess of one million pounds per year have numerous entries into surface and drinking waters due to their ubiquity. The commonality between many of these compounds is their polarity, which makes them water-soluble. While both PPCPs and HPVCs have been entering into the environment for decades, advances in analyte detection have increased the ability of scientists to identify these compounds in surface, waste and drinking waters. Methods for polar compound suites have been developed using a number of technologies, however these processes are often time consuming and require specialized instrumentation. In this study, a fast, robust method for the detection and treatment of emerging polar contaminants was developed with accompanying instrumentation. A liquid chromatography system, hyphenated to a universal gas phase detector, flame ionization detector (FID), was designed. By using pure subcritical water as a mobile phase, temperature was used to control chromatographic retention. This instrument may be used for rapid screening of environmental samples with minimal preparation. Using subcritical water chromatography allowed for testing of mass transfer between subcritical water and organic phases, which provides data on the transport of polar contaminants between solvent phases. A second component of the work in this dissertation was to test a treatment protocol for waste streams, which demonstrated the reduction of selected analytes within the PPCP and HPVC classes. Subcritical water wet oxidation allowed for the breakdown of all polar organic molecules dissolved in a water sample. As a thermochemical process, the oxidation reaction further reduced select compounds that remain after current biological waste removal processes, and provided a value-added process to current wastewater treatment, in which a needed process, disinfection, can be coupled to additional contaminant removal

The calculation of physicochemical descriptors and their application in predicting properties of drugs and other compounds.

The work presented may be divided into two main sections: The first section focuses on the important aspect of compound descriptor determination. The method by which descriptors are obtained indirectly through compound solubility in organic solvents and direct water-solvent partition measurements is illustrated by example for drug compounds. This approach is extended through the derivation of gas-water and water-solvent partition equations for the n-alcohols which in the future will be available for use in descriptor determination. Importantly, the equation coefficients are also interpreted to deduce various physicochemical properties of the homologous series of alcohols. An alternative method to assign descriptors is probed through reversed-phase HPLC. Measurements are recorded for a series of solutes on several bonded phases and multivariate analysis is used to investigate the interrelationship between columns in an effort to isolate the most suitable phases. The second section is concerned with application of the Abraham General Solvation Equation to examine processes of special interest in drug design; aqueous solubility and intestinal absorption. An algorithm to predict water solubility is obtained containing an additional cross-term which is found to compensate at least partly for a melting point correction term. The amended equation is shown to be comparable in accuracy to commercially available packages for a test set of 268 structurally diverse compounds. Of further importance in drug delivery is the process of intestinal absorption. An extensive literature search provides evaluated absorption data for a large set of drug compounds and forms a strong basis for subsequent QSAR analysis. Intestinal absorption is found to be comparable in humans and rat, and predominantly dependent on the hydrogen-bonding capability of the drug. The mechanism of absorption is considered through transformation of the percent absorption data to an overall rate constant

Modified aqueous mobile phases: A way to improve retention behavior of active pharmaceutical compounds and their impurities in liquid chromatography

Most commonly used analytical technique for determination of active pharmaceutical ingredients and their impurities in quality control throughout all phases of drug research, development and manufacture is definitely reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC). However, pharmaceutical industry professionals are often faced with various challenges in RP mode, which cannot be resolved with common variations in the composition of the mobile phase. These challenges often occur when analyzing compounds that contain basic ionizable groups, possess large differences in polarities and require consumption of high amounts of toxic organic solvents. Among available strategies for addressing the aforementioned issues, the most convenient one includes RP-HPLC mobile phase modifications by an addition of the proper chemical compounds. In that respect, RP-HPLC method can be easily adapted to the needs of the analysis without time-consuming and expensive equipment procurement. In this review the chaotropic chromatography, micellar liquid chromatography, and cyclodextrin modified RP-HPLC systems are presented and discussed in details. Special attention is devoted to the theoretical background, the possibility of retention modeling and applications in various fields of pharmacy, as well as their prospective in further research

Structure- and Ligand-Based Design of Novel Antimicrobial Agents

The use of computer based techniques in the design of novel therapeutic agents is a rapidly emerging field. Although the drug-design techniques utilized by Computational Medicinal Chemists vary greatly, they can roughly be classified into structure-based and ligand-based approaches. Structure-based methods utilize a solved structure of the design target, protein or DNA, usually obtained by X-ray or NMR methods to design or improve compounds with activity against the target. Ligand-based methods use active compounds with known affinity for a target that may yet be unresolved. These methods include Pharmacophore-based searching for novel active compounds or Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) studies. The research presented here utilized both structure and ligand-based methods against two bacterial targets: Bacillus anthracis and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The first part of this thesis details our efforts to design novel inhibitors of the enzyme dihydropteroate synthase from B. anthracis using crystal structures with known inhibitors bound. The second part describes a QSAR study that was performed using a series of novel nitrofuranyl compounds with known, whole-cell, inhibitory activity against M. tuberculosis. Dihydropteroate synthase (DHPS) catalyzes the addition of p-amino benzoic acid (pABA) to dihydropterin pyrophosphate (DHPP) to form pteroic acid as a key step in bacterial folate biosynthesis. It is the traditional target of the sulfonamide class of antibiotics. Unfortunately, bacterial resistance and adverse effects have limited the clinical utility of the sulfonamide antibiotics. Although six bacterial crystal structures are available, the flexible loop regions that enclose pABA during binding and contain key sulfonamide resistance sites have yet to be visualized in their functional conformation. To gain a new understanding of the structural basis of sulfonamide resistance, the molecular mechanism of DHPS action, and to generate a screening structure for high-throughput virtual screening, molecular dynamics simulations were applied to model the conformations of the unresolved loops in the active site. Several series of molecular dynamics simulations were designed and performed utilizing enzyme substrates and inhibitors, a transition state analog, and a pterin-sulfamethoxazole adduct. The positions of key mutation sites conserved across several bacterial species were closely monitored during these analyses. These residues were shown to interact closely with the sulfonamide binding site. The simulations helped us gain new understanding of the positions of the flexible loops during inhibitor binding that has allowed the development of a DHPS structural model that could be used for high-through put virtual screening (HTVS). Additionally, insights gained on the location and possible function of key mutation sites on the flexible loops will facilitate the design of new, potent inhibitors of DHPS that can bypass resistance mutations that render sulfonamides inactive. Prior to performing high-throughput virtual screening, the docking and scoring functions to be used were validated using established techniques against the B. anthracis DHPS target. In this validation study, five commonly used docking programs, FlexX, Surflex, Glide, GOLD, and DOCK, as well as nine scoring functions, were evaluated for their utility in virtual screening against the novel pterin binding site. Their performance in ligand docking and virtual screening against this target was examined by their ability to reproduce a known inhibitor conformation and to correctly detect known active compounds seeded into three separate decoy sets. Enrichment was demonstrated by calculated enrichment factors at 1% and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves. The effectiveness of post-docking relaxation prior to rescoring and consensus scoring were also evaluated. Of the docking and scoring functions evaluated, Surflex with SurflexScore and Glide with GlideScore performed best overall for virtual screening against the DHPS target. The next phase of the DHPS structure-based drug design project involved high-throughput virtual screening against the DHPS structural model previously developed and docking methodology validated against this target. Two general virtual screening methods were employed. First, large, virtual libraries were pre-filtered by 3D pharmacophore and modified Rule-of-Three fragment constraints. Nearly 5 million compounds from the ZINC databases were screened generating 3,104 unique, fragment-like hits that were subsequently docked and ranked by score. Second, fragment docking without pharmacophore filtering was performed on almost 285,000 fragment-like compounds obtained from databases of commercial vendors. Hits from both virtual screens with high predicted affinity for the pterin binding pocket, as determined by docking score, were selected for in vitro testing. Activity and structure-activity relationship of the active fragment compounds have been developed. Several compounds with micromolar activity were identified and taken to crystallographic trials. Finally, in our ligand-based research into M. tuberculosis active agents, a series of nitrofuranylamide and related aromatic compounds displaying potent activity was investigated utilizing 3-Dimensional Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (3D-QSAR) techniques. Comparative Molecular Field Analysis (CoMFA) and Comparative Molecular Similarity Indices Analysis (CoMSIA) methods were used to produce 3D-QSAR models that correlated the Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) values against M. tuberculosis with the molecular structures of the active compounds. A training set of 95 active compounds was used to develop the models, which were then evaluated by a series of internal and external cross-validation techniques. A test set of 15 compounds was used for the external validation. Different alignment and ionization rules were investigated as well as the effect of global molecular descriptors including lipophilicity (cLogP, LogD), Polar Surface Area (PSA), and steric bulk (CMR), on model predictivity. Models with greater than 70% predictive ability, as determined by external validation and high internal validity (cross validated r2 \u3e .5) were developed. Incorporation of lipophilicity descriptors into the models had negligible effects on model predictivity. The models developed will be used to predict the activity of proposed new structures and advance the development of next generation nitrofuranyl and related nitroaromatic anti-tuberculosis agents

Micellar chromatographic partition coefficients and their application in predicting skin permeability

The major goal for physicochemical screening of pharmaceuticals is to predict human drug absorption, distribution, elimination, excretion and toxicity. These are all dependent on the lipophilicity of the drug, which is expressed as a partition coefficient i.e. a measure of a drug’s preference for the lipophilic or hydrophilic phases. The most common method of determining a partition coefficient is the shake flask method using octanol and water as partitioning media. However, this system has many limitations when modeling the interaction of ionised compounds with membranes, therefore, unreliable partitioning data for many solutes has been reported. In addition to these concerns, the procedure is tedious and time consuming and requires a high level of solute and solvent purity. Micellar liquid chromatography (MLC) has been proposed as an alternative technique for measuring partition coefficients utilising surfactant aggregates, known as micelles. This thesis investigates the application of MLC in determining micelle-water partition coefficients (logPMW) of pharmaceutical compounds of varying physicochemical properties. The effect of mobile phase pH and column temperature on the partitioning of compounds was evaluated. Results revealed that partitioning of drugs solely into the micellar core was influenced by the interaction of charged and neutral species with the surface of the micelle. Furthermore, the pH of the mobile phase significantly influenced the partitioning behaviour and a good correlation of logPMW was observed with calculated distribution coefficient (logD) values. More interestingly, a significant change in partitioning was observed near the dissociation constant of each drug indicating an influence of ionised species on the association with the micelle and retention on the stationary phase. Elevated column temperatures confirmed partitioning of drugs considered in this study was enthalpically driven with a small change in the entropy of the system because of the change in the nature of hydrogen bonding. Finally, a quantitative structure property relationship was developed to evaluate biological relevance in terms of predicting skin permeability of the newly developed partition coefficient values. This study provides a better surrogate for predicting skin permeability based on an easy, fast and cheap experimental methodology, and the method holds the predictive capability for a wider population of drugs. In summary, it can be concluded that MLC has the ability to generate partition coefficient values in a shorter time with higher accuracy, and has the potential to replace the octanol-water system for pharmaceutical compounds

Estudio termodinámico de la solubilidad de algunas sulfonamidas en mezclas cosolventes

Se determinó la solubilidad de sulfadiazina, sulfamerazina y sulfametazina en diferentes mezclas cosolventes n-alcohol + agua entre 293,15 K y 313,15 K, y se calcularon las respectivas funciones termodinámicas de solución. Los parámetros de solvatación preferencial de los fármacos se derivaron a partir de sus propiedades termodinámicas de solución por medio de los métodos de las integrales inversas de Kirkwood-Buff (Inverse Kirkwood-Buff integrals IKBI) y cuasi-reticular cuasi-químico (Quasi-Lattice Quasi-Chemical, QLQC). A partir de los estudios acerca del efecto del solvente, se encontró que estos fármacos son sensibles a los efectos específicos de solvatación preferencial. El para ́metro de solvatación preferencial por metanol, δx1,3, es negativo en mezclas ricas en agua pero positivo en los demás casos, y en el caso de los otros alcoholes (etanol y n-propanol) el parámetro de solvatación preferencial es negativo en mezclas ricas en agua al igual que en mezclas ricas en el n-alcohol, y positivo en mezclas de composiciones intermedias. Es conjeturable que, en mezclas ricas en agua la hidratación hidrofóbica en torno a los anillos aromáticos y/o grupos metilo juega un papel relevante en la solvatación de los fármacos, mientras que en mezclas ricas en etanol y n-propanol, el parámetro de solubilidad podría estar influenciando en mayor proporción la hidratación de los fármacos. Se observaron relaciones entálpicas-entrópicas no lineales al graficar la entalpía en función de la energía de Gibbs de solución. Las gráficas ∆solnH0 vs. ∆solnG0 muestran dos tendencias diferentes en función de la pendiente obtenida, una pendiente negativa indica una conducción entrópica y una pendiente positiva indica una conducción entálpica. Por otro lado, se observó la relación de entalpía-entropía lineal en una gráfica de entalpía frente a la entropía de la solución también, en este caso la pendiente superior a uno indica que el mecanismo de conducción es la entalpía y la pendiente inferior a uno indica que el mecanismo de conducción es la entropía De otro lado, los valores estimados de solubilidad, obtenidos mediante el uso de modelos semiempíricos presentan desviaciones notables con respecto a los valores experimentales. Estos resultados demostraron la necesidad de mejorar las estrategias teóricas para estimar esta propiedad, demostrando además la gran importancia de la determinación experimental de la solubilidad de los fármacos en aquellas mezclas cosolventes útiles en métodos de purificación y en el diseño de formas de dosificación.Abstract. The equilibrium solubility of sulfadiazine, sulfamerazine and sulfamethazine in different n- alcohol + water binary mixtures at temperatures from 293.15 K to 313.15 K was determined and the respective thermodynamic quantities of solution were calculated. Additionally, the preferential solvation parameters of the drug were derived from their thermodynamic solu- tion properties by means of the inverse Kirkwood-Buff integral (IKBI) and the quasi-lattice quasi-chemical (QLQC) methods. From solvent effect studies, it was found that these drugs are sensitive to specific solvation effects. The preferential solvation parameter by methanol, δx1,3 is negative in water-rich but positive in other mixtures; otherwise, in the case of the others two alcohols (ethanol and n-propanol) the preferential solvation parameter is negative in water-rich mixtures and n-alcohol-rich too, and positive in mixtures of intermediate compositions. It is conjecturable that in water-rich mixtures the hydrophobic hydration around aromatic rings and/or methyl groups plays a relevant role in the drug solvation while in ethanol-rich and n-propanol-rich mixtures the solubility parameter is more responsible for the drug solvation. A nonlinear enthalpy-entropy relationships were observed in plots of enthalpy vs. Gibbs energy of solution. The plot of ∆solnH0 vs. ∆solnG0 show two different trends according to the slope obtained, the negative slope indicate that the driving mechanism is the entropy and positive slope indicate that the driving mechanism is the enthalpy. Otherwise, the linear enthalpy-entropy relationship was observed in a plot of enthalpy vs. entropy of solution too, in this case slope higher than one indicate that the driving mechanism is the enthalpy and the slope lower than one indicate that the driving mechanism is the entropy. On the other hand, the estimated solubility values obtained using semi empiric models pre- sent notorious deviations with respect to the experimental values. These results demonstrated that it is necessary to improve the theoretical strategies for estimating this property, and more over, they also demonstrated the great importance of the experimental determination of drugs solubility in those cosolvent mixtures useful in purification methods and dosage forms design.Doctorad