Dehydroacetic acid hydrazones as potent enzyme inhibitors: design, synthesis and computational studies

The present study offers the work on the hydrazone derivatives of dehydroacetic acid to be considered for computational and synthetic studies. The hydrazone derivatives of dehydroacetic acid were designed with different electron-withdrawing and electron-releasing substituents. The hydrazones and the parent compound (dehydroacetic acid) were subjected to computational studies to evaluate their pharmacological properties. The compounds were assessed by applying Lipinski’s rule followed by ADMET predictions. Among all the derivatives under studies, 4-hydroxy-6-methyl-3-(1-(2-(2-nitrophenyl) hydrazineylidene) ethyl)-2H-pyran-2-one was found to be the most effective derivative which was further evaluated against BSA, trypsin, amylase, lipase and cathepsins (B and H) by using docking studies. The computational results were also verified experimentally by synthesizing the derivative as well as performing enzyme inhibition studies on the synthesized hydrazone and the parent compound.