The present work reports an efficient synthesis of fluorinated pyridinium salts-based hydrazones under both conventional and eco-friendly ultrasound procedures. The synthetic approach first involves the preparation of halogenated pyridinium salts through the condensation of isonicotinic acid hydrazide (1) with p-fluorobenzaldehyde (2) followed by the nucleophilic alkylation of the resulting N-(4-fluorobenzylidene)isonicotinohydrazide (3) with a different alkyl iodide. The iodide counteranion of 5-10 was subjected to an anion exchange metathesis reaction in the presence of an excess of the appropriate metal salts to afford a new series of fluorinated pyridinium salts tethering a hydrazone linkage 11-40. Ultrasound irradiation led to higher yields in considerably less time than the conventional methods. The newly synthesized ILs were well-characterized with FT-IR, ¹H NMR, (13)C NMR, (11)B, (19)F, (31)P and mass spectral analyses. The ILs were also screened for their antimicrobial and antitumor activities. Within the series, the salts tethering fluorinated counter anions 11-13, 21-23, 31-33 and 36-38 were found to be more potent against all bacterial and fungal strains at MIC 4-8 µg/mL. The in vitro antiproliferative activity was also investigated against four tumor cell lines (human ductal breast epithelial tumor T47D, human breast adenocarcinoma MCF-7, human epithelial carcinoma HeLa and human epithelial colorectal adenocarcinoma Caco-2) using the MTT assay, which revealed that promising antitumor activity was exhibited by compounds 5, 12 and 14.
Keywords: anticancer activity; antimicrobial activity; hydrazones; metathesis; ultrasound irradiation.