Trifluoromethyl quinoline derivative targets inhibiting HDAC1 for promoting the acetylation of histone in cervical cancer cells

Cervical cancer is the leading cause of death among gynecological malignant tumors, especially due to the poor prognosis of patients with advanced tumors due to recurrence, metastasis, and chemotherapy resistance. Therefore, exploring new antineoplastic drugs with high efficacy and low toxicity may bring new expectations in patients with cervical cancer. Natural products and their derivatives exert an antitumor activity. Therefore, in this work, combined with network pharmacology analysis and experimental validation, we investigated the anti-cervical cancer activity and molecular mechanism of a new trifluoromethyl quinoline (FKL) derivative in vivo and in vitro. FKL117 inhibited the proliferation of cervical cancer cells in a dose and time-dependent manner, induced apoptosis in HeLa cells, arrested the cell cycle in the G2/M phase, and regulated the expression of the apoptotic and cell cycle-related proteins Bcl-2, Bax, cyclin B1, and CDC2. We used online databases to obtain HDAC1 as one of the possible targets of FKL117 and the target binding and binding affinity were modeled by molecular docking. The results showed that FKL117 formed a hydrogen bond with HDAC1 and had good binding ability. We found that FKL117 targeted to inhibit the expression and function of HDAC1 and increased the acetylation of histone H3 and H4, which was also confirmed in vivo. The migration of HMGB1 from the nucleus to the cytoplasm further verified the above results. In conclusion, our study suggested that FKL117 might be used as a novel candidate for targeting the inhibition of HDAC1 against cervical cancer.