Ricerc@Sapienza

Antibiotic resistance represents a major threat worldwide. Gram-positive and Gram-negative opportunistic pathogens are becoming resistant to all known drugs mainly because of the overuse and misuse of these medications and the lack of new antibiotic development by the pharmaceutical industry. There is an urgent need to discover structurally innovative antibacterial agents for which no pre-existing resistance is known. This work describes the identification, synthesis and biological evaluation of a novel series of 1,5-diphenylpyrrole compounds active against a panel of ESKAPE bacteria.

Novel 3-aroyl-1,4-diarylpyrrole derivatives were synthesized to explore structure-activity relationships at the phenyls at positions 1 and 4 of the pyrrole. The presence of amino phenyl rings at positions 1 and 4 of the pyrrole ring were found to be a crucial requirement for potent antitumor activity. Several compounds strongly inhibited tubulin assembly through binding to the colchicine site. Compounds 42, 44, 48, 62 and 69 showed antitumor activity with low nanomolar IC50 values in several cancer cell lines.