Sulfonamides are a classic group of chemotherapeutic drugs with a broad spectrum of pharmacological action, including anticancer activity. In this work, reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography and biomimetic chromatography were applied to characterize the lipophilicity of sulfonamide derivatives with proven anticancer activities against human colon cancer. Chromatographically determined lipophilicity parameters were compared with obtained logP, employing various computational approaches. Similarities and dissimilarities between experimental and computational logP were studied using principal component analysis, cluster analysis, and the sum of ranking differences. Furthermore, quantitative structure-retention relationship modeling was applied to understand the influences of sulfonamide's molecular properties on lipophilicity and affinity to phospholipids.
Keywords: lipophilicity; quantitative structure-retention relationships; sulfonamide derivatives.