1'-methylspiro[indoline-3,4'-piperidine] Derivatives: Design, Synthesis, Molecular Docking and Anti-tumor Activity Studies
Background: Spirocyclic indoline compounds widely exist in numerous natural products with good biological activities and some drug molecules in many aspects. In recent years, it has attracted extensive attention as potent anti-tumor agents in the fields of pharmacology and chemistry. Objective: In this study, we focused on designing and synthesizing a set of novel 1'-H-spiro[indole-3,4'-piperidine] derivatives, which were evaluated by preliminary bioactivity experiment in vitro and molecular docking. Method: The key intermediate 1'-methylspiro[indoline-3,4'-piperidine] (B4) reacted with benzenesulfonyl chloride with different substituents under alkaline condition to obtain its sulfonyl derivatives (B5-B10). We evaluated their antiproliferative activities against A549, BEL-7402 and HeLa cells by MTT assay. We performed the CDOCKER module in Discovery Studio 2.5.5 software for molecular modeling of compound B5, and investigated the binding of compound B5 with the target proteins from PDB database. Results: The results indicated that compounds B4-B10 exhibited good antiproliferative activities against the above three types of cells, in which compound B5 with chloride atom as electron-withdrawing substituent on a phenyl ring showed the highest potency against BEL-7402 cells (IC50=30.03±0.43 μg/mL). By binging of the prominent bioactive compound B5 to CDK, c-Met, EGFR protein crystals, The binding energy of B5 with these three types receptors are -44.3583 kcal/mol, - 38.3292 kcal/mol, -33.3653 kcal/mol respectively. Conclusion: Six 1'-methylspiro[indoline-3,4'-piperidine] derivatives were synthesized and evaluated against BEL-7402, A- 549, HeLa cell lines. Compound B5 showed significant inhibition on BEL-7402 cell lines. Molecular docking revealed that B5 showed good affinity by the good fitting between B5 and these three targets with amino acid residues in active sites which encourage us to conduct further evaluation such as the kinase experiment.