Design, synthesis, and <i>in vitro</i> biological evaluation of novel benzimidazole tethered allylidenehydrazinylmethylthiazole derivatives as potent inhibitors of <i>Mycobacterium tuberculosis</i>.
Surineni G, Gao Y, Hussain M, Liu Z, Lu Z, Chhotaray C, Islam MM, Hameed HMA, Zhang T.
Tuberculosis (TB) has become one of the most significant public health problems in recent years. Antibiotic therapy remains the mainstay of TB control strategies, but the increasing resistance of mycobacterial species has heightened alarm, requiring the development of novel drugs in order to improve treatment outcomes. Here, as an effort to identify novel and effective antitubercular agents, we designed and synthesized a series of novel substituted benzimidazolallylidenehydrazinylmethylthiazole derivatives <i>via</i> a multi-component molecular hybridization approach with single molecular architecture. Our design strategy involved assembling the antitubercular pharmacophoric fragments benzimidazole, 2-aminothiazole and substituted α,β-unsaturated ketones <i>via</i> condensation reactions. All the newly synthesized compounds were fully characterized <i>via</i> NMR and mass spectral data and evaluated for <i>in vitro</i> biological activity against the H37Ra strain of <i>Mycobacterium tuberculosis</i>. From the biological evaluation data, we identified some effective compounds, of which <b>8g</b> and <b>7e</b> were the most active ones (both having MIC values of 2.5 μg mL<sup>-1</sup>). In addition, compound <b>8g</b> exhibited a lower cytotoxicity profile. We conceive that compound <b>8g</b> may serve as a chemical probe of interest for further lead optimization studies with the general aim of developing novel and effective antitubercular agents.