Novel cyanoacetamide integrated phenothiazines: synthesis, characterization, computational studies and in vitro antioxidant and anticancer evaluations

A series of novel phenothiazine based cyanoacrylamides 6a-d have been synthesized from phenothiazine through multistep synthetic strategy. The structure of these novel molecules (6a-d) has been determined by FT-IR, ¹H NMR and ¹³C NMR spectral techniques. Computational studies were carried out for the synthesized compounds 6a-d using DFT method with B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) basis set. The target compounds 6a-d have been screened for their in vitro antioxidant and anticancer activity. The antioxidant data revealed that the compounds 6c and 6d exhibited high radical scavenging activity with IC₅₀ value of 37.32 and 39.07 μM, respectively. Furthermore, all the synthesized compounds displayed significant in-vitro anticancer activity against both the pancreatic tumor cells AsPC1 and SW1990. Particularly, the compound 6c exhibited the highest activity among the molecules tested against both the tumor cells viz., AsPC1 and SW1990.