Design of more potent quinazoline derivatives as EGFRWT inhibitors for the treatment of NSCLC: a computational approach

Abstract

Abstract Background Lung cancer remains the leading and deadly type of cancer worldwide. It was estimated to account for about 25% of the 7 million people that died as a result of cancer-related issues/mortality every year in the world. Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the lethal/deadly class of lung cancer with nearly 1.5 million reported cases and less than 20% survival rate. Therefore, it becomes necessary to explore more effective NSCLC drugs. Result A computational approach was employed here to design ten new EGFRWT inhibitors using compound 18 as a template for the design identified with the best binding affinity and good pharmacokinetic properties previously reported in our work. The modeled inhibitory activities of these newly designed EGFRWT inhibitors (range from 7.746966 to 11.09261) were better than that of the hit compound with pIC50 of 7.5639 and gefitinib the positive control with pIC50 of 5.879426. The ligand-binding interaction between these newly designed EGFRWT inhibitors and the EGFR tyrosine kinase receptor as shown in Table 3 was investigated and elucidated using molecular docking protocol. Based on the molecular docking results, the binding affinities of these newly designed EGFRWT inhibitors were found to be between − 8.8 and − 9.5 kcal/mol. The designed compound SFD10 has the highest binding affinity of − 9.5 kcal/mol followed by compound SFD8 (with a binding affinity of − 9.3 kcal/mol), then by compound SFD9 and 4 (each with a binding affinity of − 9.3 kcal/mol). None of them was found to have more than one violation of the filtering criterion used in this study thereby showing good ADMET properties. Conclusion The modeled inhibitory activities and binding affinities of these newly designed EGFRWT inhibitors were found to be higher than that of the template compound and the control (gefitinib) used in this research. They were also seen to be non-toxic with good pharmacokinetic properties.