New acridine derivatives as promising agents against methicillin-resistant staphylococci – From tests to in silico analysis

Exploring the therapeutic potential of acridines: Synthesis, structure, and biological applications

The objective of this review was to explore the trends and chemical characteristics of acridines and their derivatives, analyze their contribution to the scientific literature and international cooperation, identify the most influential authors and articles, and provide an overview of the knowledge produced in elucidating their mechanisms of action. To this end, a bibliometric analysis was performed using RStudio software, along with a systematic review focusing on articles indexed in the "Web of Science" and "Scopus" databases. The keywords used were "acridine$", "Synthesi$", "Structure$", and "Biologic* Application$" for the period from 2020 to 2024. Relevant articles were carefully selected from these databases, and a bibliometric analysis was carried out to comprehensively discuss the most relevant biological activities associated with acridines. The results showed that, during the analyzed period, China and India led in the number of publications, followed by Brazil in third place. However, a decline in the number of publications was observed in the last two years of the period. Keyword analysis revealed that antitumor activity remains the most extensively studied aspect of acridines and their derivatives.

Synthesis and Evaluation of Antiproliferative Activity, Topoisomerase IIα Inhibition, DNA Binding and Non-Clinical Toxicity of New Acridine-Thiosemicarbazone Derivatives

In this study, we report the synthesis of twenty new acridine–thiosemicarbazone derivatives and their antiproliferative activities. Mechanisms of action such as the inhibition of topoisomerase IIα and the interaction with DNA have been studied for some of the most active derivatives by means of both in silico and in vitro methods, and evaluations of the non-clinical toxicities (in vivo) in mice. In general, the compounds showed greater cytotoxicity against B16-F10 cells, with the highest potency for DL-08 (IC₅₀ = 14.79 µM). Derivatives DL-01 (77%), DL-07 (74%) and DL-08 (79%) showed interesting inhibition of topoisomerase IIα when compared to amsacrine, at 100 µM. In silico studies proposed the way of bonding of these compounds and a possible stereoelectronic reason for the absence of enzymatic activity for CL-07 and DL-06. Interactions with DNA presented different spectroscopic effects and indicate that the compound CL-07 has higher affinity for DNA (Kb = 4.75 × 10⁴ M⁻¹; Ksv = 2.6 × 10³ M⁻¹). In addition, compounds selected for non-clinical toxicity testing did not show serious signs of toxicity at the dose of 2000 mg/kg in mice; cytotoxic tests performed on leukemic cells (K-562) and its resistant form (K-562 Lucena 1) identified moderate potency for DL-01 and DL-08, with IC₅₀ between 11.45 and 17.32 µM.

Thin-Layer Chromatography Gradient Optimization Strategy for Wet Load Adsorption Flash Chromatography

Chromatography is one of the most popular methods for the separation of compounds in modern pharmaceutical industry and science. Despite the extensive use of the reversed phase chromatography in analytical and preparative applications, the normal phase adsorption chromatography has a special place in purifying post-reaction mixtures or the separation of natural extracts, especially in wet load mode, because of simplicity and high velocity of preparation. Complex mixtures, more difficult to separate, require gradient methods to obtain better results of separations. These methods can be developed by external software, but the automatic methods are often not very accurate and the negative impact of wet load application on separation quality is considerable in them. Therefore, we present the thin-layer chromatography (TLC) gradient optimization strategy for wet load separations to obtain repeatable results of separations for different compounds without worrying about negative impact of wet loading on separation quality. The strategy provides information about an elution model of desired compound, which is used to develop the gradient method. The strategy also allows to standardize the separation length, because gradient methods performed by the TLC gradient optimization strategy have a very similar duration time in column volumes. The method can also be simply scaled because of using the column volume as a base unit in calculations.