In recent years, suppressing tubulin polymerization has been developed as a therapeutic approach for cancer treatment. Thus, new derivatives based on thiazol-5(4H)-ones have been designed and synthesized in an eco-friendly manner. The synthesized derivatives have the same essential pharmacophoric features of colchicine binding site inhibitors. The anti-proliferative activity of the new derivatives was evaluated on three human cancer cell lines (HCT-116, HepG-2, and MCF-7) using MTT assay procedure and colchicine was used as a positive control. Compounds 4f, 5a, 8f, 8g, and 8k showed superior antiproliferative activities against the three tested cell lines with IC50 values ranging from 2.89 to 9.29 μM. Further investigation for the most active cytotoxic agents as tubulin polymerization inhibitors was also performed in order to explore the mechanism of their anti-proliferative activity. Tubulin polymerization assay results were found to be comperable with the cytotoxicity results. Compounds 4f and 5a were the most potent tubulin polymerization inhibitors with an IC50 value of 9.33 and 9.52 nM, respectively. Further studies revealed the ability of 5a to induce apoptosis and arrest cell cycle growth at the G2/M phase. Molecular docking studies were also conducted to investigate possible binding interactions between the target compounds and the tubulin heterodimer active site. From these studies, it was concluded that inhibition of tubulin polymerization yields the reported cytotoxic activity.
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