Design, synthesis, biological evaluation and molecular docking study of novel urea-based benzamide derivatives as potent poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1 (PARP-1) inhibitors

Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1 (PARP-1) is one of the key members of DNA repair enzymes that is responsible for the repair of DNA single-strand breaks. Inhibition of PARP-1 has been demonstrated to be a promising strategy to selectively kill tumor cells by targeting DNA repair pathway. Herein, a series of novel urea-based benzamide derivatives were designed and synthesized based on the structure-based drug design strategy. The anticancer activities against five human cancer cell lines including HCT116, MDA-MB-231, HeLa, A579 and A375 were evaluated and the preliminary structure-activity relationships were summarized. Among them, compounds 23f and 27f exhibited potent antiproliferative effects against HCT116 cells with IC50 values of 7.87 μM and 8.93 μM, respectively. Moreover, both compounds displayed excellent PARP-1 inhibitory activities with IC50 values of 5.17 nM and 6.06 nM, respectively. Mechanistic investigations showed that 23f and 27f could effectively inhibit colony formation and cell migration of HCT116 cells. Furthermore, 23f and 27f could cause cell cycle arrest at G2/M phase, and induce apoptosis by upregulating the expression of Bax and cleaved Caspase-3 and downregulating the expression of Caspase-3 and Bcl-2 in HCT116 cells. In addition, molecular docking studies provided the rational binding modes of these compounds in complex with PARP-1. Collectively, these results suggested that 23f and 27f could serve as promising drug candidates for further investigation.