Quinazoline analogues as cytotoxic agents; QSAR, docking, and in silico studies

Background and purpose: Synthesis and investigation of pharmacological activity of novel compounds are time and money-consuming. However, computational techniques, docking, and in silico studies have facilitated drug discovery research to design pharmacologically effective compounds. Experimental approach: In this study, a series of quinazoline derivatives were applied to quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis. A collection of chemometric methods were conducted to provide relations between structural features and cytotoxic activity of a variety of quinazoline derivatives against breast cancer cell line. An in silico-screening was accomplished and new impressive lead compounds were designed to target the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-active site based on a new structural pattern. Molecular docking was performed to delve into the interactions, free binding energy, and molecular binding mode of the compounds against the EGFR target. Findings/Results: A comparison between different methods significantly indicated that genetic algorithm-partial least-squares were selected as the best model for quinazoline derivatives. In the current study, constitutional, functional, chemical, resource description framework, 2D autocorrelation, and charge descriptors were considered as significant parameters for the prediction of anticancer activity of quinazoline derivatives. In silico screening was employed to discover new compounds with good potential as anticancer agents and suggested to be synthesized. Also, the binding energy of docking simulation showed desired correlation with QSAR and experimental data. Conclusion and implications: The results showed good accordance between binding energy and QSAR results. Compounds Q1-Q30 are desired to be synthesized and applied to in vitro evaluation.