Objective: The significant drawbacks of chemotherapy are that it destroys healthy cells, resulting in adverse effects. Hence, there is a need to adopt new techniques to develop cancer-specific chemicals that target the molecular pathways in a non-toxic fashion. This study aims to screen pyrazole-condensed heterocyclics for their anticancer activities and analyse their enzyme inhibitory potentials EGFR, ALK, VEGFR and TNKS receptors.
Methods: The structures of the compounds were confirmed by IR, NMR and Mass spectral studies. The in silico techniques applied in this study were molecular docking and pharmacophore modeling to analyse the protein-ligand interactions, as they have a significant role in drug discovery. Drug-likeness properties were assessed by the Lipinski rule of five and ADMET properties. Anticancer activity was performed by in vitro MTT assay on lung cancer cell lines.
Results: The results confirm that all the synthesised pyrazole derivatives interacted well with the selected targets showing docking scores above-5 kcal/mol. Pyrazole 2e interacted well with all the four lung cancer targets with its stable binding mode and was found to be potent as per the in vitro reports, followed by compounds 3d and 2d. Pharmacophore modeling exposed the responsible features responsible for the anticancer action. ADMET properties reported that all the compounds were found to have properties within the standard limit. The activity spectra of the pyrazoles predicted that pyrazolopyridines (2a-2e) are more effective against specific receptors such as EGFR, ALK and Tankyrase.
Conclusion: Thus, this study suggests that the synthesised pyrazole derivatives can be further investigated to validate their enzyme inhibitory potentials by in vivo studies
