Synthesis and potential anti-cancer activity of some novel selenocyanates and diselenides.

In the present study, twenty fourselenocyanate and diselenide compoundswere synthesized and characterized, their anticancer activities against the human cancer cell lines Caco2, BGC-823, MCF-7 and PC-3 were determined. Interestingly, most of the new compounds showed active in reducing the viability of different cancer celllines. Compounds 1g and 1h exhibited higherpromising activities than other derivatives. The most active compound 1g showed the least IC 50 values against the four cancer cell lines, particularly to PC-3 with IC 50 values below 5 muM. Compounds 1g and 1h were selected to monitor the expression levels of Bcl-2, IL-2 and caspase-3 molecular biomarkers. Interestingly, the two compounds downregulated the Bcl-2 expression levels and upregulated the expression of IL-2 and caspase-3 in PC-3 cells compared to untreated cells. Moreover, most of the synthesized organoselenides exhibited good Gpx-like activities comparable to ebselen. These results appear that introduction of selenocyanate (-SeCN) or diselenides (-Se-Se-) moiety to some carboxyl derivativescould serve as a promising launch point for the further design of this type of organic selenium anticancer agent.