Synthesis, Characterization and in†vitro Anticancer Evaluation of 5-Sulfinyl(sulfonyl)-4-arylsulfonyl-Substituted 1,3-Oxazoles.

A novel series of 5-sulfinyl(sulfonyl)-4-arylsulfonyl-substituted 1,3-oxazoles has been synthesized, characterized and subjected to NCI in vitro assessment. Cancer cell lines of all subpanels were most sensitive to 2-{[4-[(4-fluorophenyl)sulfonyl]-2-(2-furyl)-1,3-oxazol-5-yl]sulfinyl}acetamide (3 l). Its antiproliferative and cytotoxic activity averaged over each subpanel was manifested in a very narrow range of concentrations (GI50 : 1.64-1.86 µM, TGI: 3.16-3.81 µM and LC50 : 5.53-7.27 µM), i. e. practically did not depend on the origin of the cancer cell line. The COMPARE matrix using TGI vector showed a high positive correlation of 3 l (r=0.88) with the intercalating agent aclarubicin, which inhibits topoisomerases. The absence in the database of standard agents that have a high correlation with the cytotoxicity of this compound suggests that it may have a unique mechanism of action. According to the results of the docking analysis, the most promising anticancer target for compound 3 l is DNA topoisomerase IIß. The obtained results indicate the anticancer activity of 5-sulfinyl(sulfonyl)-4-arylsulfonyl-substituted 1,3-oxazoles, which may be useful for the development of new anticancer drugs. 2-{[4-[(4-Fluorophenyl)sulfonyl]-2-(2-furyl)-1,3-oxazol-5-yl]sulfinyl}acetamide (3 l), as the most active, can be recommended for further in-depth studies.

1,3-Oxazole derivatives as potential anticancer agents: Computer modeling and experimental study.

Microtubules play a significant role in cell growth and functioning. Therefore inhibition of the microtubule assemblies has emerged as one of the most promising cancer treatment strategies. Predictive QSAR models were built on a series of selective inhibitors of the tubulin were performed by using Associative Neural Networks (ANN). To overcome the problem of data overfitting due to the descriptor selection, a 5-fold cross-validation with variable selection in each step of the analysis was used. All developed QSAR models showed excellent statistics on the training (total accuracy: 0.96-0.97) and test sets (total accuracy: 0.95-97). The models were further validated by 11 synthesized 1,3-oxazole derivatives and all of them showed inhibitory effect on the Hep-2 cancer cell line. The most promising compound showed inhibitory activity IC50=60.2µM. In order to hypothesize their mechanism of action the top three compounds were docked in the colchicine binding site of tubulin and showed reasonable docking scores as well as favorable interactions with the protein.