%0 Journal Article %T Quantification of Polyethylene Glycol Esters of Methotrexate and Determination of Their Partition Coefficients by Validated HPLC Methods %A Gholamhossein Yousefi %A Seyed Mohsen Foroutan %A Afshin Zarghi %A Alireza Shafaati %J Iranian Journal of Pharmaceutical Research %D 2009 %I School of Pharmacy, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences %X Conjugation of methotrexate (MTX) (MW 454) with different molecular weights of polyethylene glycol (PEG) including methoxy-peg (mpeg) 750 D and 5000 D and diol-peg 35000 D led to compounds that are physicochemically highly different from the parent compound, MTX. In this study, an HPLC system consisting of C8 column and UV detector (¦Ë=342 nm), using a mixture of 30:70 v/v phosphate-citrate buffer (pH 4): methanol mobile phase, was validated for quantification of the esters. Three other HPLC methods using three mixture of buffer phosphate-citrate (pH 6): methanol at 30:70, 40:60 and 50:50 v/v, respectively, was set for estimation of partition coefficients the esters. Eight reference standard materials were selected from literature covering the retention times lower and higher than esters. An identical log P (4.3) was obtained for all three esters, despite their different molecular weights (i.e. 1200, 5500 and 35500 D theoretically). In addition the log P obtained differs from that of the parent drug (-1.4). This high difference comes probably from different ability of drug and esters in ionization of carboxylic acid groups. %K Partition coefficient %K Methotrexate %K HPLC %K Validation %K Pegylation %K Polymer conjugation %U http://www.ijpr-online.com/docs/20091/IJPR%20686.pdf