Pronounced anti-proliferative activity and tumor cell selectivity of 5-alkyl-2-amino-3-methylcarboxylate thiophenes

A decade's overview of 2-aminothiophenes and their fused analogs as promising anticancer agents

Over the past decades, cancer has been a challenging domain for medicinal chemists as it is an international health concern. In association, small molecules such as 2-aminothiophenes and their derivatives showed significant antitumor activity through variable modes of action. Therefore, this article aims to review the advances regarding these core scaffolds over the past 10 years, where 2-aminothiophenes and their fused analogs are classified and discussed according to their biological activity and mode of action, in the interest of boosting new design pathways for medicinal chemists to develop targeted antitumor candidates.

Diverse Thiophenes as Scaffolds in Anti-cancer Drug Development: A Concise Review

Thiophenes are one of the abundantly found heterocyclic ring systems in many biologically active compounds. Moreover, various substituted thiophenes exert numerous pharmacological actions on account of their isosteric resemblance with compounds of natural origin, thus rendering them with diverse actions like antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, analgesic, antiallergic, hypotensives, etc. In this review, we specifically explore the chemotherapeutic potential of a variety of structures consisting of thiophene scaffolds as prospective anticancer agents.

Thiophene-based derivatives as anticancer agents: An overview on decade's work

Heterocyclic compounds hold a pivotal place in medicinal chemistry due to their wide range of biological activities and thus, are exhaustively explored in the field of drug design and development. Continuous efforts are being carried out for the development of medicinal agents especially, for dreadful diseases like cancer. Thiophene, a sulfur containing heterocyclic scaffold, has emerged as one of the relatively well-explored scaffold for the development of library of molecules having potential anticancer profile. Thiophene analogs have been reported to bind with a wide range of cancer-specific protein targets, depending on the nature and position of substitutions. Accordingly, thiophene analogs have been reported to cause their biological action through inhibition of different signaling pathways involved in cancer. Functionally, different anticancer targets require different structural features, so researchers have tried to synthesize new thiophene derivatives with varied substitutions. In the present review, authors have presented the information available on thiophene-based molecules as anticancer agents with special focus on synthetic methodologies, biological profile and structure activity relationship (SAR) studies. Various patents granted for thiophene containing molecules as anticancer have also been included.

2-Amino-3-methylcarboxy-5-heptyl-thiophene (TJ191) is a selective anti-cancer small molecule that targets low TβRIII-expressing malignant T-cell leukemia/lymphoma cells

Current chemotherapy regimens often include non-specific cytostatic/cytotoxic drugs, which do not distinguish between normal and tumor cells, therefore causing considerable systemic toxicity. We previously reported the synthesis and anti-proliferative activity of a novel synthetic 2-aminothiophene-3-carboxylic acid ester derivative TJ191 that selectively targets certain cancer cells without affecting the proliferation of other cancer cells or normal fibroblasts or immune cells (over 600-fold selectivity). In a panel of ten human T-cell leukemia/lymphoma cell lines and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), we now found that transforming growth factor β type III receptor (TβRIII) expression correlates inversely with TJ191 sensitivity, but not with sensitivity against classical chemotherapeutic drugs, thus serving as a predictive marker for TJ191 sensitivity. Accordingly, CRISPR/Cas9-mediated knock-out of TβRIII partially restored the susceptibility of TJ191-resistant cells to this novel compound. Our findings highlight TJ191 as a potent and selective anti-cancer molecule with pronounced activity against human malignant T-cells expressing low levels of TβRIII.

2-Aminothiophene scaffolds: Diverse biological and pharmacological attributes in medicinal chemistry

2-Aminothiophenes are important five-membered heterocyclic building blocks in organic synthesis, and the chemistry of these small molecules is still developing based on the discovery of cyclization by Gewald. Another attractive feature of 2-aminothiophene scaffolds is their ability to act as synthons for the synthesis of biological active thiophene-containing heterocycles, conjugates and hybrids. Currently, the biological actions of 2-aminothiophenes or their 2-N-substituted analogues are still being investigated because of their various mechanisms of action (e.g., pharmacophore and pharmacokinetic properties). Likewise, the 2-aminothiophene family is used as diverse promising selective inhibitors, receptors, and modulators in medicinal chemistry, and these compounds even exhibit effective pharmacological properties in the various clinical phases of appropriate diseases. In this review, major biological and pharmacological reports on 2-aminothiophenes and related compounds have been highlighted; most perspective drug-candidate hits were selected for discussion and described, along with additional synthetic pathways. In addition, we focused on the literature dedicated to 2-aminothiophenes and 2-N-substituted derivatives, which have been published from 2010 to 2017.