Design, synthesis, biological evaluation, molecular docking and QSAR studies of 2,4-dimethylacridones as anticancer agents

Drug resistance in cancer is an unmet medical challenge and a major drawback for the failure of many chemotherapeutic drugs. Search for targeted, effective drug with minimum toxicity is an urgent need. Acridone which is an alkaloid derivative has been attributed as molecule in reversing drug resistance in cancer cells for a long time now. In the present investigation, an attempt has been made to explore the chemosensitizing ability of 2,4-dimethylacridones with alkyl side chain containing terminally substituted tertiary amino groups. Considering the structural features required for the MDR reversal activity, acridone derivatives have been synthesized with propyl and butyl side chain containing morpholinyl, piperidinyl, N-methylpiperazinyl, N,N-diethylamino, N-diethanolamino, N-[(β-hydroxylethyl)]piperazino at the terminus of the alkyl side chain. cLogP values for the synthesized compounds ranged from 2.96 to 4.72 for the propyl derivatives and 3.41 to 5.15 for the butyl derivatives. All the compounds were screened against breast cancer sensitive MCF7 and resistant MCF7/ADR cell lines. Compounds 12e and 12f have shown better cytotoxicity profiles with IC₅₀ of 4 ± 0.05 and 2 ± 0.03 μM against MCF7 cells, 5.21 ± 0.13 and 2.56 ± 0.05 μM against MCF7/ADR cells. Photolabelling studies with [³H]-azidopine and molecular docking studies have identified that 2,4-dimethylacridones have potential to modulate the P-gp mediated multidrug resistance. Docking studies identified that compounds have shown favorable interactions with P-gp. QSAR equation was derived for cytotoxicity vs molecular descriptors of acridone derivatives. Best models with good predictive ability have been generated with very high square correlation coefficient (R²) values of 0.889, 0.964 and 0.983.