Synthesis and antitumor properties of novel alizarin analogs

Series of novel hybrids of alizarin and diamide scaffold (3a–3h, 7a–7h) were designed and synthesized. In vitro antitumor activities of all compounds against HepG-2, CNE, Spca-2, Hct-116, and MGC-803 cell lines were evaluated, and employing standard MTT assay compared with commercial anticancer drug 5-fluorouracil (5-FU). Compounds 7b, 7c, 7d, and 7e showed relatively high cytotoxicity. Especially, compound 7c exhibited the best cytotoxicity against CNE cells with IC50 9.08 µM, which was even stronger than that of 5-FU. All the synthesized compounds exhibited low cytotoxicity against HUVEC cells. The action mechanism of representative compound 7c was preliminarily investigated by flow cytometry, which indicated that the compound can induce cell apoptosis in CNE cells. Cell cycle analysis showed that compound 7c mainly arrested CNE cells in G1 stage. In addition, the binding properties of a model analog 7c to DNA were investigated by different methods (fluorescence, CD spectroscopy), and the results indicated that 7c showed a moderate preference for binding ct-DNA.