Synthesis, evaluation and docking studies on steroidal pyrazolones as anticancer and antimicrobial agents

A series of new steroidal pyrazolones have been synthesized, characterised and evaluated for their in vitro anticancer activity. They were tested against five cancer (SW480, HepG2, A549, HeLa and HL-60) cell lines. The synthesized compounds showed high selectivity and compound 4 showed the strongest inhibitory activity against human SW480 (IC 50 = 11.67 μmol L −1 ). In addition, the synthesized compounds were tested for their antimicrobial activity by disc diffusion assay and MIC by broth micro dilution method against Gram-positive, Gram-negative strains of bacteria as well as fungus strains and we found a correlation between the observed and predicted antimicrobial activities. Docking studies were performed to investigate the hypothetical binding mode of the target compounds. This study provided a new molecular scaffold for the further development of anticancer as well as antimicrobial agents.