Design, synthesis and evaluation of novel indirubin-based N-hydroxybenzamides, N-hydroxypropenamides and N-hydroxyheptanamides as histone deacetylase inhibitors and antitumor agents

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Highlights

  • Three novel series of indirubin-based hydroxamic acids were synthesized.

  • All three series exhibited potent HDAC inhibition.

  • All three series exhibited very strong cytotoxicity in three human cancer cell lines (SW620, PC-3, NCI-H23).

  • Representative compounds 4a and 7a arrested SW620 cells at G0/G1 phase.

  • Representative compounds 7a and 10a strongly induced apoptosis in SW620 cells.

Abstract

Several novel indirubin-based N-hydroxybenzamides, N-hydropropenamides and N-hydroxyheptanamides (4a-h, 7a-h, 10a-h) were designed using a fragment-based approach with structural features extracted from several previously reported HDAC inhibitors, such as SAHA (vorinostat), MGCD0103 (mocetinostat), nexturastat A and PXD-101 (belinostat). The biological results reveal that our compounds showed excellent cytotoxicity toward three common human cancer cell lines (SW620, PC-3 and NCI-H23) with IC50 values ranging from 0.09 to 0.007 µM. The cytotoxicity of the compounds was equipotent or even up to 10-times more potent than adriamycin and up to 205-times more potent than SAHA. Among the series of N-hydroxypropenamides, compounds 10a-d were the most potent HDAC inhibitors as well as cytotoxicity toward the cell lines tested. In addition, the strong inhibitory activites toward HDAC of our compounds were observed with IC50 values of below-micromolar range. Especially, compound 4a inhibited HDAC6 with an IC50 value of 29-fold lower than that against HDAC2 isoform. Representative compounds 4a and 7a were found to significantly arrest SW620 cells at G0/G1 phase. Compounds 7a and 10a were found to strongly induce apoptosis in SW620 cells. Docking studies revealed some important features affecting the selectivity against HDAC6 isoform. The results clearly demonstrate the potential of the indirubin-hydroxamic acid hybrids and these compounds should be very promising for further development.

Section snippets

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the principal financial supports from the National Foundation for Science and Technology of Vietnam (NAFOSTED, Grant number 104.01-2019.09). The work was also partly supported by a grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2017R1A5A2015541).

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