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In the present work, thirty-two hybrid compounds containing cycloalka[b]thiophene and indole moieties (TN5, TN5 1-7, TN6, TN6 1-7, TN7, TN7 1-7, TN8, TN8 1-7) were designed, synthesized and evaluated for their cytotoxic and antileishmanial activity against Leishmania amazonensis promastigotes. More than half of the compounds (18 compounds) exhibited significant antileishmanial activity (IC50 lower than 10.0μg/L), showing better performance than the reference drugs (tri- and penta-valent antimonials). The most active compounds were TN8-7, TN6-1 and TN7 with respective IC50 values of 2.1, 2.3 and 3.2μg/mL. Demonstrating that all of the compounds were less toxic than the reference drugs, even at the highest evaluated concentration (400μg/mL), no compound tested presented human erythrocyte cytotoxicity. Compound TN8-7's effectiveness against a trivalent antimony-resistant culture was demonstrated. It was observed that TN8-7's antileishmanial activity is associated with DNA fragmentation of L. amazonensis promastigotes. Chemometric studies (CPCA, PCA, and PLS) highlight intrinsic solubility/lipophilicity, and compound size and shape as closely related to activity. Our results suggest that hybrid cycloalka[b]thiophene-indole derivatives may be considered as lead compounds for further development of new drugs for the treatment of leishmaniasis.

The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly joining chemoinformatics in the search for the development of new drugs to be used in the treatment of diseases. These computational studies have the advantage of being less expensive and optimize the study time, and thus the interest in this area is increasing. Among the techniques used is the development of multitarget directed ligands (MTDLs), which has become an ascending technique, mainly due to the improvement in the quality of treatment involving several drugs. Multitarget therapy is more effective than traditional drug therapy that emphasizes maximum selectivity for a single target. In this review a multitarget drug survey was carried out as a promising strategy in several important diseases: neglected diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, AIDS, and cancer. In addition, we discuss Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) techniques as a tool in the projection of multitarget compounds against these diseases.

In this study, we synthesized eight new compounds containing the 2-amino-cycloalkyl[b]thiophene and acridine moieties (ACT and ACS -ACS ). None tested compounds presented human erythrocyte cytotoxicity. The new compounds presented antipromastigote activity, where ACS and ACS derivatives presented significant antileishmanial activity, with better performance than the reference drugs (tri and pentavalent antimonials), with respective IC values of 9.60 ± 3.19 and 10.95 ± 3.96 μm. Additionally, these two derivatives were effective against antimony-resistant Leishmania (Leishmania) amazonensis strains. In addition, binding and fragmentation DNA assays were performed. It was observed that the antileishmanial activity of ACS is not associated with DNA fragmentation of the promastigote forms. However, it interacted with DNA with a binding constant of 10 m . In partial least-squares studies, it was observed that the most active compounds (ACS and ACS ) showed lower values of amphiphilic moment descriptor, but there was a correlation between the lipophilicity of the molecules and antileishmanial activity. Furthermore, the docking molecular studies showed interactions between thiophene-acridine derivatives and the active site of pyruvate kinase enzyme with the major contribution of asparagine 152 residue for the interaction with thiophene moiety. Thus, the results suggested that the new thiophene-acridine derivatives are promising molecules as potential drug candidates.

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