Synthetic Strategies and Biological Potential of Coumarin-Chalcone Hybrids: A New Dimension to Drug Design

Privileged scaffolds are ubiquitous as effective templates in drug discovery regime. Natural and synthetically derived hybrid molecules are one such attractive scaffold for therapeutic agent development due to their dual or multiple modes of action, minimum or no side effects, favourable pharmacokinetics and other advantages. Coumarins and chalcone are two important classes of natural products affording diverse pharmacological activities which make them ideal templates for building coumarin-chalcone hybrids as effective biological scaffold for drug discovery research. Provoked by the promising medicinal application of hybrid molecules as well as those of coumarins and chalcones, the medicinal chemists have used molecular hybridisation strategy to report dozens of coumarin- chalcone hybrids with a wide spectrum of biological properties including anticancer, antimicrobial, antimalarial, antioxidant, anti-tubercular and so on. The present review provides a systematic summary on synthetic strategies, biological or chemical potential, SAR studies, some mechanisms of action and some plausible molecular targets of synthetic coumarin-chalcone hybrids published from 2001 till date. The review is expected to assist medicinal chemists in the effective and successful development of coumarin- chalcone hybrid based drug discovery regime.