Anticancer Activity of Chalcones and Its Derivatives: Review and In Silico Studies

Abstract

Chalcones are direct precursors in the biosynthesis of flavonoids. They have an α,β-unsaturated carbonyl system which gives them broad biological properties. Among the biological properties exerted by chalcones, their ability to suppress tumors stands out, in addition to their low toxicity. In this perspective, the present work explores the role of natural and synthetic chalcones and their anticancer activity in vitro reported in the last four years from 2019 to 2023. Moreover, we carried out a partial least square (PLS) analysis of the biologic data reported for colon adenocarcinoma lineage HCT-116. Information was obtained from the Web of Science database. Our in silico analysis identified that the presence of polar radicals such as hydroxyl and methoxyl contributed to the anticancer activity of chalcones derivatives. We hope that the data presented in this work will help researchers to develop effective drugs to inhibit colon adenocarcinoma in future works.

A Promising Therapeutic Scaffold Fusing Chalcone/Coumarin Targeting Colorectal Cancer: Design, Synthesis, Biological and ADME‐tox Modelling

“…A structure-activity relationship (SAR) was rationalized by analyzing the substituents effects and it revealed key differences between those evaluated hybrids 3 a-h (Figure 3 Thereon, different studies have been reported with coumarin and chalcone derivatives, showing the great potential of these two pharmacophores containing methoxy groups, highlighting the properties in different biological models, including colorectal cancer. [31,56] Besides, Alhakamy and colleagues [57] also reported the in vitro anticancer activity of different coumarinchalcone hybrids. They showed two active molecules with methoxy substituents at the 3', 5' positions of the aroyl rings, with IC 50 values in the range of 6.8 μM and 17.2 μM on breast cancer cells (MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231).…”

Targeting STAT3 and NF-κB Signaling Pathways in Cancer Prevention and Treatment: The Role of Chalcones

“…These groups can interact with specific molecular targets within cancer cells, such as enzymes or receptors, and disrupt their normal function. For example, chalcones with hydroxyl groups have been found to inhibit key enzymes involved in cell proliferation, while those with methoxy groups have shown potent anti-angiogenic effects [ 23 ].…”

Molecular Docking and Molecular Dynamic Investigations of Xanthone-Chalcone Derivatives against Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor for Preliminary Discovery of Novel Anticancer Agent

“…In this work, we investigated a combined structure of xanthone and chalcone because both skeletons showed remarkable anticancer activities [23,32]. Thirtyseven xanthone-chalcone derivatives have been designed (Table 1).…”

“…It means the chloro substituent enhanced the anticancer activity of xanthone up to 1.85× stronger [28]. On the other hand, chalcone is another anticancer candidate, in which the anticancer activity of chalcone strongly depends on the presence of the other functional groups such as fluoro, chloro, bromo, iodo, cyano, carboxylic acid, nitro, sulfonic acid, methyl, amino, hydroxy, and thiol [29][30][31][32]. As an example, chlorinated chalcones gave the IC 50 value in a range of 0.8-4.3 μM against MCF-7, HeLa, and WiDr cancer cells [33][34].…”