Novel quinazolinone derivatives as anticancer agents: Design, synthesis, biological evaluation and computational studies

A novel series of quinazoline-pyrimidine derivatives (3a-3i) linked to different aryl substitutions were designed and synthesized as promising anti-cancer candidates. The Chemical structures of the new compounds were confirmed by IR, 1HNMR, 13CNMR, and Mass spectroscopy. Antiproliferative activities of all synthesized compounds were evaluated against MCF-7 and SW480 cell lines by the MTT method. The biological results exhibited IC50 values in the range of 1.1 to 59.0 μM. Compounds 3d and 3f were found to be the most active compounds against the SW480 cell line, with IC50= 1.1 and 8 μM respectively. Furthermore, in silico analyses of the Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity (ADMET) profiles of the synthesized compounds exhibited that our molecules have acceptable predictive ADMET features. The results of the docking studies were in line with biological outputs, Density functional theory (DFT) studied 3a and 3d's reactivity descriptors at the B3LYP/6-31G** level of theory. HOMO, LUMO, and electrostatic surface potential energy were also examined. According to DFT calculations, compound 3d exhibits higher reactivity than compound 3a, which is consistent with the experimental observations. Molecular dynamic simulation of the potent synthetic compound (3d) and native ligand (Erlotinib) was performed to validate the docking study and also, RMSD, RMSF, total hydrogen bond, and clusters were analyzed.