Promising Anticancer Activity of β-Carboline Derivatives: Design, Synthesis, and Pharmacological Evaluation

β-carboline consists of a pyridine ring fused to an indole skeleton; it possesses numerous pharmacological activities, including anticancer. Previously, we reported satisfactory 2D and 3D QSAR study on derivatives. Based studies, designed, synthesized, characterized, screened fourteen derivatives for anticancer activity. Eleven them demonstrated potent activity against both liver (HepG2) adenocarcinoma (A549) cell lines. Compound 1-(N, N-dimethylbenzenamine)-3-(4-(p-tolylmethanimine)-5-thio-1, 2, 4-triazol-3-yl) (9) was found be most cancer lines equipotent towards standard drug Adriamycin. Compounds 1-(p-tolyl)-3-(4-(p-(iminomethyl)-N, N-dimethylbenzenamine) -5-thio-1, (4) N-dimethylbenzenamine)-3-(4-(m-tolylmethanimine)-5-thio-1, (10) were 7 10 times less as compared Adriamycin the HepG2 line. Molecular docking also performed with Glide program explore binding mode between synthesized receptor CDK2 [1AQ1] protein.