Course Description

This course is part of the Drug Discovery and Pharma Management master course at UCL School of Pharmacy

Director, Honorary Professor at UCL School of Pharmacy

Klara Valko

Leaving GSK after 22 years of service, she is now founder director of Bio-Mimetic Chromatography Ltd providing data analysis, biomimetic HPLC method development and measurements, in vivo drug distribution modelling and various courses for pharmaceutical companies. She is an Honorary Professor to the UCL School of Pharmacy since 2004; leading the Physchem/ADME module for the Drug Discovery MSc course. She has developed biomimetic HPLC methods for high throughput measurements of serum albumin, glycoprotein and phospholipid binding. She invented the Chromatographic Hydrophobicity Index (CHI) for the fast determination of a compound’s lipophilicity using generic gradient reversed phase chromatography. She has built mathematical statistical models based on measured properties to predict human in vivo drug distribution, such as, volume of distribution, DRUGeff max and tissue/plasma partition. She has contributed to the Drug Efficiency Index (DEI) concept and dose estimation based on DEI. She has published over 100 papers that have achieved over 3000 citations. She has written a book on “Physicochemical and Biomimetic Properties in Drug Discovery; Chromatographic Techniques for lead optimization” published by Wiley in 2014. Currently, she is working on the second edition of the “Handbook of Analytical Separations” Volume 1 “Separation Methods in Drug Synthesis and Purification” published by Elsevier.  

Course curriculum

  • 1

    Lipophilicity and biomimetic properties supporting drug discovery

  • 2

    Welcome to the course!

  • 3

    Chapter #1a

    • Early drug discovery and lipophilicity

    • Test your learning on lipophilicity and its measurements

    • Chapter #1b

    • Test you learning on biomimetic lipophilicity

  • 4

    Chapter #2

    • Property forecast Index and biomimetic properties

    • Test your learning

  • 5

    Chapter #3

    • Abraham solvation equation model for comparing various lipophilicity measurements

    • Test your learning

  • 6

    Next steps

    • Before you go...

    • Questions and answers about lipophilicity and biomimetic properties