Synthesis of Novel Chromene/[1,2,3]triazole Hybrid Derivatives: Cytotoxicity/Molecular Docking Studies

Abstract

An easy and convenient approach has been adopted to synthesize a new series of chromene/[1,2,3]triazole hybrid derivatives involving Cu(I) catalyzed alkyne-azide 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition and a single step multicomponent reaction. The novel synthesized compounds (8a-l) were screened for cytotoxicity against three tumour cell lines i.e. MCF-7, PC-3 and HeLa using reference drug doxorubicin. Compound 8j (m-acetyl) showed an outstanding activity against all the three cell lines with IC50 values of 2.67 ± 0.03, 3.13 ± 0.03 and 3.05 ± 0.05 μM respectively. Compound 8k (p-acetyl) also exhibited good activity with IC50 values of 3.16 ± 0.05, 4.68 ± 0.03 and 3.81 ± 0.02 μM and the values are closer to doxorubicin IC50 values. The rest of the synthesized compounds have displayed good to moderate activity compared to reference drug. Molecular docking simulations of compounds 8b, 8f and 8j exhibited an excellent binding interactions against the crystal structure of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR).