Tuberculosis is an infectious disease caused by infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. About 9 million people get infected with this bacteria and 1.3 million die from the disease annually, which makes it the second most frequent cause of death by infectious diseases after AIDS. One of the main reasons for its persistence and repeatability is the resistant mycobacterial cell envelope, which contains mycolic acids. Isoniazid (INH), a frontline antitubercular drug, inhibits InhA enzyme in FAS-II system of M. tuberculosis, causing the mycolic acid synthesis to stop, which leads to alterations in the cell wall stability and pathogen death. INH is a prodrug activated by KatG enzyme. During the last decade, we have seen a growing problem of INH resistant M. tuberculosis strains, where the katG gene mutation leaded to reduced formation of KatG enzyme, causing the decreased conversion of INH to its active form. Compounds that do not need to be activated by KatG and inhibit InhA directly therefore show a great potential for development of new active substances against resistant strains. In a recent high-throughput screening campaign performed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), interesting compounds were identified that represent possible new scaffolds for InhA inhibitors. With the aim to assess their developability and to establish initial structure-activity relationship, we synthesized a focused library of derivatives structurally related to one of the hits (a tetrahydropyrane derivative). We synthesized 3-methoxyphenyl derivate of the initial compound, which we later on tried to convert to 3-hydroxyphenyl derivate through demethylation. We also synthesized some truncated and variously substituted analogues of the initial compound that lack the thiazole moiety, starting the synthesis from commercially available intermediates.
The prepared compounds were then evaluated for their inhibition of InhA and for their antibacterial activity against M. tuberculosis. Since none of the compounds showed improved results comparing to hit inhibitor, our conclusion is that the starting compound is not a viable hit to be further investigated.
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