Design, Synthesis and Biological Evaluation of Some Triazole Schiff’s Base Derivatives as Potential Antitubercular Agents

Tuberculosis (TB) is the second important cause of death worldwide caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. There is a need to find and develop new Anti-TB medications that are effective, inexpensive and suitable with human immunodeficiency virus and other anti-TB drugs used in many countries and mainly the developing countries where the disease is widespread. These drugs must be designed to shorten treatment time and to be active against resistant forms of the mycobacteria that will help to increase the patients compliance. A key compound which could be used as a lead to meet these requirements, is the thiolactomycin (TLM). This antibiotic which is naturally available has an ability to treat M. tuberculosis by inhibiting condensing enzymes called FAS II (mtFabH, KasA and KasB) which are related to biosynthesis of mycolic acid.

Our main aims are to design and synthesize analogues of TLM as new lead molecules which could be a possible anti–TB candidate. To overcome the synthetic challenges associated with preparing the chiral TLM analogues; we synthesized and investigated a series of triazole analogues as inhibitors of KasA enzyme and the whole cell Mycobacteria. A series of twelve compounds were synthesized, purified and fully characterized using several spectroscopic techniques. Molecular modelling studies for our synthesised compounds were achieved by using a modelling program called AutoDock 4.2 utilising rigid docking.

Our results indicate that analogues of TLM show a good activity as compared to TLM.

The activity obtained for the synthesized compounds against Mycobacteria tuberculosis indicate that the synthesised compounds 1, 2, 6 and 9 are pharmacologically active as they restrained the growth of the Mycobacteria bacteria.