Synthesis, Evaluation and QSAR Studies of 16-(4 & 3,4-Substituted) Benzylidene Androstene Derivatives as Anticancer Agents

In a systematic effort aimed at identifying new steroidal cytotoxic agents with potent antipoliferative activity against cancer cells and developing their QSAR models, series of 4-nitro, 4-isopropyl, 4-methoxy and 3,4-dimethoxy substituted benzylidene androst-5-ene derivatives were synthesized. The selected compounds were evaluated for antineoplastic activity against a panel of three human cell lines-breast, CNS and lungs at NCI, Bethesda, USA. The results presented herein reports that compounds 7, 9, 10, 15,16, 18, 20-25, 30, 32-36 and 44 have been found to be active anticancer agents. The QSAR of 20 compounds was performed separately for each cell line and best-fit QSAR models are developed. The QSAR models obtained have shown significant correlations (r2 range: 0.9163 to 0.8164) and good predictive performance (q2 range: 0.8499- 0.6320). The validation of models has also been performed using the test set of compounds 5, 15 and 44.