Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters
Antimycobacterial evaluation of novel hybrid arylidene
thiazolidine-2,4-diones
c,d,e
Singanan Ponnuchamy a, Selvaraj Kanchithalaivan b, Raju Ranjith Kumar b, , Mohamed Ashraf Ali
,
⇑
Tan Soo Choon c
a Orchid Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals Ltd, R&D Center, Chennai 600119, India
b Department of Organic Chemistry, School of Chemistry, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai 625021, Tamil Nadu, India
c Institute for Research in Molecular Medicine, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Minden 11800, Penang, Malaysia
d New Drug Discovery Research, Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Alwar Pharmacy College, Alwar, Rajasthan 301030, India
e New Drug Discovery Research, Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Sunrise University, Alwar, Rajasthan 301030, India
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history:
A series of novel hybrid heterocycles comprising arylidene thiazolidine-2,4-dione and 1-cyclopropyl-2-
(2-fluorophenyl)ethanone were synthesized. These compounds were evaluated for their antimycobacte-
rial activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv in High Throughput Screen. Most of the hybrid
arylidene thiazolidine-2,4-diones displayed moderate to good activity with MIC of less than 50 lM.
Compound 1m exhibited maximum potency being 5.87 fold more active at EC50 and 6.26 fold more active
Received 2 October 2013
Revised 31 December 2013
Accepted 6 January 2014
Available online 11 January 2014
at EC90 than the standard drug pyrimethamine.
Keywords:
Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Thiazolidine-2,4-dione
Knoevenagel condensation
Antimycobacterial activity
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
High Throughput Screen
Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic bacterial infection caused by
Mycobacterium Tuberculosis bacteria (MTB), which spreads through
air and usually infects the lungs. TB can be treated by taking sev-
eral drugs for a period of 6–9 months. Of the approved drugs, the
first-line anti-TB agents that form the core of treatment regimen
include isoniazid (INH), rifampin (RIF), ethambutol (EMB) and pyr-
azinamide (PZA). Regimens for treating TB disease have an initial
phase of 2 months, followed by a choice of several options for
the continuation phase of either 4 or 7 months. The initial empiric
treatment of TB starts with a 4-drug regimen: isoniazid, rifampin,
pyrazinamide and either ethambutol or streptomycin. Once the TB
isolate is known to be fully susceptible, ethambutol (or streptomy-
cin, if it is used as a fourth drug) can be discontinued.1 After
2 months of therapy (for a fully susceptible isolate), pyrazinamide
can be stopped. Isoniazid and rifampin are continued as daily or
intermittent therapy for 4 more months. If isolated isoniazid resis-
tance is documented, isoniazid is discontinued and treatment with
rifampin, pyrazinamide and ethambutol is continued for the entire
6 months. The Directly Observed Therapy (DOT) is the most recom-
mended for all patients. With DOT, patients on the above regimens
can be switched to 2–3 times per week dosing after an initial
2 weeks of daily dosing.2
One of the most significant methods for the development of
highly active compounds is the combination of active pharmaco-
phores into a single unit.3 The biological screening of such
compounds may result in new lead compounds with better activity
than the standard drugs. In this context, we envisage to investigate
the antimycobacterial activity of novel hybrid thiazolidine-2,4-
diones 1 (Fig. 1) that comprise 5-arylidene-thiazolidine-2,4-dione
and 1-cyclopropyl-2-(2-fluorophenyl)ethanone unit. The latter is
the key component of the platelet inhibitor prasugrel 2.4 Inciden-
tally, thiazolidine-2,4-dione derivatives have been identified as
the privileged class of organic heterocycles with profound biologi-
cal activities. The well known drugs used for the treatment of type
II diabetes mellitus troglitazone 35 and pioglitazone 46 comprise
thiazolidine-2,4-dione moiety (Fig. 1). Troglitazone 37 has been
shown to exhibit anticancer activities through the inhibition of
the Raf/MEK/ERK signaling pathway. Further, the 5-arylidene thia-
zolidine-2,4-dione derivatives have been identified as potent and
highly selective inhibitors of the PIM kinase.8 However, the
antimycobacterial activity of these heterocyclic derivatives are still
unknown. The above importance of 5-arylidene thiazolidine-2,4-
diones and in view of our continued interest in the synthesis and
biological evaluation of novel heterocycles,9 we herein report the
⇑
Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 9655591445.
0960-894X/$ - see front matter Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.