Anticancer potential of novel symmetrical and asymmetrical dihydropyridines against breast cancer via EGFR inhibition: molecular design, synthesis, analysis and screening

Abstract

A series of novel symmetrical and asymmetrical dihydropyridines (HD 1-15) were designed, subjected to in silico ADMET prediction, synthesized, analyzed by IR, NMR, Mass analytical techniques and evaluated against epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) as inhibitors against Breast cancer. The results of predicted ADMET studies demonstrated the drug-likeness properties of the reported compounds. The in vitro cytotoxicity assessment of the synthesized compounds revealed that all of them showed good activity (IC₅₀ ranging from 16.75 to 66.54 μM) towards MCF-7 breast cancer cells compared to the standard drug, Lapatinib (IC₅₀ = 2.02 μM). Among these, compounds HD-6, HD-7, and HD-8 displayed the most potent activity with IC₅₀ value of 21.26, 16.75, and 18.33 μM, respectively. Cytotoxicity of all compounds was tested on normal vero cells for comparison at different concentrations using the MTT assay. In addition to the MTT assay, the potent dihydropyridines derivatives were screened for EGFR^wt kinase inhibition assay at concentrations ranging from 1 nM to 360 nM. Among the three compounds tested, HD-8 showed reasonably good inhibition with an IC₅₀ value of 15.90 ± 1.20 nM compared to a standard Lapatinib IC₅₀ value of 10.28 ± 1.01 nM. Based on the molecular docking study against EGFR, the most active derivatives HD-7 and HD-8 were docked against the active site of the protein and showed better binding affinity than the standard lapatinib. Additionally, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed to explore the stability of the protein–ligand complex, its dynamic behavior, and the binding affinity.