Probing the origins of aromatase inhibitory activity of disubstituted coumarins via QSAR and molecular docking

Abstract

This study investigated the quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) of imidazole derivatives of 4,7-disubstituted coumarins as inhibitors of aromatase, a potential therapeutic protein target for the treatment of breast cancer. Herein, a series of 3,7- and 4,7-disubstituted coumarin derivatives (1-34) with R1 and R2 substituents bearing aromatase inhibitory activity were modeled as a function of molecular and quantum chemical descriptors derived from low-energy conformer geometrically optimized at B3LYP/6-31G(d) level of theory. Insights on origins of aromatase inhibitory activity was afforded by the computed set of 7 descriptors comprising of F10[N-O], Inflammat-50, Psychotic-80, H-047, BELe1, B10[C-O] and MAXDP. Such significant descriptors were used for QSAR model construction and results indicated that model 4 afforded the best statistical performance. Good predictive performance were achieved as verified from the internal (comprising the training and the leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO-CV) sets) and external sets affording the following statistical parameters: R²_Tr = 0.9576 and RMSE_Tr = 0.0958 for the training set; Q²_CV = 0.9239 and RMSE_CV = 0.1304 for the LOO-CV set as well as Q²_Ext = 0.7268 and RMSE_Ext = 0.2927 for the external set. Significant descriptors showed correlation with functional substituents, particularly, R₁ in governing high potency as aromatase inhibitor. Molecular docking calculations suggest that key residues interacting with the coumarins were predominantly lipophilic or non-polar while a few were polar and positively-charged. Findings illuminated herein serve as the impetus that can be used to rationally guide the design of new aromatase inhibitors.