Tuberculosis is a widespread disease, it is estimated that a quarter of the population is infected with it, and more than a million people die from the infection every year. The most useful drugs in the treatment of tuberculosis are rifampicin and isoniazid. In addition to them, pyrazinamide and ethambutol are also in the first line of defence. The treatment of the active form is rather long-term and in the best-case scenario it lasts 6 months, and when resistance occurs it is even longer. Isoniazid is a prodrug that requires prior cellular activation for its action, i.e. oxidation by KatG, which enables it to inhibit the InhA enzyme. InhA is a key enzyme in the biosynthesis of mycolic acids, which enable the mycobacterial cell to survive in extreme conditions by forming a waxy layer that surrounds the cell. By inhibiting InhA, isoniazid prevents their synthesis, which leads to cell lysis. However, there is an increasing incidence of point mutations in KatG, which disable the activation of isoniazid, which leads to resistant forms of tuberculosis and thus to the search for new, direct inhibitors of the InhA enzyme.
As part of this master's thesis, we started the synthesis of new potential direct inhibitors of InhA with a tetrahydropyran skeleton, where we made minor changes to the phenyl ring and the methylene linker. With this, we wanted to investigate the active site of the enzyme InhA.
We synthesized 5 final compounds, whose ability to inhibit InhA (IC50) was determined at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Pharmacy. The compound 16 inhibited InhA enzyme in nanomolar range (IC50 = 329 nM) and that value came closer to the IC50s of already known inhibitors. In addition, colleagues at the Veterinary Faculty of the University of Ljubljana also determined antibacterial activity (MIC) on S. aureus and E. coli, because they have similar fatty acid synthesis to Mycobacterium Tuberculosis, the bacteria responsible for the infection. Unfortunately, neither compound inhibited either bacteria at a concentration of 128 µg/mL, or lower, which does not rule out the possibility that it does not inhibit M.tuberculosis.
|