Exploring substituted 3,4-dihydropyrimidinone and thione derivatives as anti-prostate cancer agents: Computational screening, synthesis, characterization, and in vitro efficacy assessment

Despite decades of research, anticancer medication therapy is still largely constrained to prevent growth and limit the spread of tumour cells. To speed up the process of finding anticancer drugs, exploring novel therapeutic macromolecules and identifying the right small molecules using an integration of computational and experimental approaches is a recent tactic adopted by investigators. In the present study, we designed and created a library of 200 ligands with 3,4-dihydropyrimidinones or their thiones linked with imidazolidinones through amide linkage and explored the extent of their in vitro anticancer activity towards human topoisomerase IIalpha (TOP2α or TOP2A) using DU-145 and PC-3 prostate cancer cell lines using the SRB assay method. This was accomplished by the molecular docking and synthesis of the titled compounds using a series of organic nucleophilic addition reactions, including the Biginelli one-pot condensation reaction. The preliminary physical character evaluation was employed for the synthesized compounds, and the structural parameters were analyzed using FTIR, proton NMR, ¹³C NMR, and LC-MS/MS. The anti-prostate cancer activity of the prepared Biginelli analogues was evaluated against cancer cell lines and mild-to-moderate reduction in the viability of cell lines was observed with compounds 5, 6, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 19. Among them, compounds 5, 14, 15, and 16 exhibited significant potent activity against TOP2α or TOP2A. This result indicated that the derivatives of Biginelli (3,4-dihydropyrimidinones/thiones) could be promising anti-prostate cancer drug candidates.