Design, synthesis and biological evaluation of 3, 4-disubstituted-imidazolidine-2, 5-dione derivatives as HDAC6 selective inhibitors

HDAC6 isoform selective inhibitors can be pursued as an alternative to pan-HDACs inhibitors due to their therapeutic effect and low toxicity. Efforts of the structure optimization of our previous compound 10c (IC50 = 4.4 nM) resulted in a new series of 3, 4-disubstituted-imidazolidine-2, 5-dione based HDAC6 inhibitors with better HDAC6 inhibitory activities and improved selectivities. The most potent compound 71 exhibited a low nanomolar HDAC6 inhibitory activity (IC50 = 2.1 nM) and showed 5545-fold, 5864-fold as well as 1638-fold selectivity relative to HDAC1, HDAC2 and HDAC8, respectively. Western blot analysis further confirmed that compound 71 selectively increased the acetylation level of α-tubulin without affecting histone H3. Moreover, compound 71 also possesses good properties in term of caspase-3 activation, apoptosis induction, anti-proliferative activity, cytotoxicity and plasma stability. Therefore, compound 71 can be applied in cancer therapy or used as a lead compound to develop more potent HDAC6 selective inhibitor.