ESTUDO TEÓRICO DA RELAÇÃO ESTRUTURA ATIVIDADE DE DERIVADOS ANÁLOGOS DA CAFEÍNA CONTRA O CÂNCER EPITELIAL

Abstract

Some caffeine analogues present activity against skin cancer. In this work, chemometric methods were applied in the search for building discriminant models between active and inactive analogues, based on the correlations among their biological activities and electronic and geometric molecular descriptors. From 70 descriptors calculated with density functional theory (DFT) with the exchange correlation functional B3LYP and the basis set 6-31G* (Gaussian 03), 10 ones were pre-selected based on their Fisher weights, and finally five descriptors (dR1, dR3, LogPR1, LogPR3 and molar area) were selected for a principal component analysis. This analysis was able to discriminate the analogues in active and inactive by using only one principal component, accounting for 49 % of the total variance. The cluster hierarchical analysis, using the descriptors selected by principal component analysis, shows that the caffeine analogues can be grouped into two major groups: active and inactive. The results of this work suggest that the anticancer activity of those analogues is related with hydrophobic, steric, and electronic properties and can be used to help modeling new caffeine analogues with more pronounced anticancer activity.