Novel Nitric Oxide Donors of Phenylsulfonylfuroxan and 3-Benzyl Coumarin Derivatives as Potent Antitumor Agents

In this work, five new hybrids of phenylsulfonylfuroxan merging 3-benzyl coumarin and their seco-B-ring derivatives 2-6 were designed and synthesized. Among them, compound 3 showed the most potent antiproliferation activities with IC₅₀ values range from 0.5 to 143 nM against nine drug-sensitive and four drug-resistant Cancer cell lines. Preliminary pharmacologic studies showed that these compounds displayed lower toxicities than that of lead compound 1. Compound 3 obviously induced the early Apoptosis and hardly affected the cell cycle of A2780, which was significantly different from compound 1. Especially, it gave 559- and 294-fold selectivity antiproliferation activity in P-gp overexpressed drug-resistant Cancer cell lines MCF-7/ADR and KB-V compared to their drug-sensitive ones MCF-7 and KB, implying that compounds 2-6 might have an extra mechanism of anti-MDR-cancer with P-gp overexpression.