Novel caffeine derivatives with antiproliferative activity

Abstract

Caffeine is probably the best known and most widely used psychoactive substance in the world. Beside its psychoactive effects, caffeine has been found to affect the cell cycle and DNA repair, as a consequence of the inhibition of ATM and ATR kinases. These two DNA damage response kinases, members of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase related protein kinase family, represent very attractive anticancer drug targets. Their inhibition can selectively sensitize cancer cells to DNA damaging agents and even kill various tumour cells in monotherapy. We developed a series of caffeine derivatives and evaluated their antiproliferative effects on 11 human tumour cell lines and compared them against caffeine and a standard ATR inhibitor VE-821. Although the new caffeine derivatives did not achieve the overall potency of VE-821, several compounds exhibited enhanced antiproliferative activity compared to caffeine and in some cell lines showed at least comparable activity to VE-821.