Promising Novel Heterocyclic Drug Candidates: Synthesis, Characterization, DFT Calculations and In Silico Investigations of Anticancer Behaviors

Abstract

In recent years, the inadequacy and high costs of current cancer treatment drugs have led to an increase in research focused on the design and synthesis of new compounds with potential applications in this field and the evaluation of their anticancer properties using in silico methods. For this purpose, four novel heterocyclic compounds (6–9) were synthesized and characterized using spectroscopic techniques. The DFT approach and B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) basis set were used to compare theoretical data with experimental ones and to obtain optimized geometries. It was observed that experimental and theoretical data were in harmony. In silico techniques were used to investigate the potential of synthesized compounds as drug candidates. ADMEt results have shown that all synthesized compounds have Lipinski’s rule of five which has searched criteria in drug candidates. Molecular docking studies were also performed against cancer-related proteins. The highest docking score between 2XIR protein and compound 8 was found to be −11.7 kcal/mol, while the lowest was −8.2 kcal/mol between 1MP8 protein and compound 9. To do meaningful comparisons standard drugs were also used in Molecular Docking studies. It was observed that all synthesized molecules had higher docking scores than standard drugs except ifebemtinib. It can be suggested that based on ADMET and molecular docking studies compound 8 has the potential to be a drug candidate after further investigations such as in vitro, in silico, etc., have been performed in this area.