Exploring Quinolone Scaffold: Unravelling the Chemistry of Anticancer Drug Design

Abstract: Globally, cancer is considered as the major leading cause in burdening the patient’s health care system globally. The growing threat of drug-resistant cancers renders an urgent need to develop more successful candidates for the anti-cancer therapy. In view of the outstanding pharmacological activities, Quinolone and its derivatives have attracted more attention towards drug designing and biological evaluation in the search for new drug molecules. The inspired researchers attempted efforts in order to discover the quinolone based analogs due to their wide range of biological activities. Due to immense pharmacological importance, distinct synthetic methods have been executed to attain new drug entities from quinolones and all the reported molecules have shown constructive anticancer activities. Some of the synthetic protocols like one pot synthesis, post-Ugi-transformation, catalysed based synthesis, enzyme-based synthesis and nano-catalyst based synthetic procedures are also discussed as recent advancements in the production of quinolone derivatives. In this review, recent synthetic approaches in the medicinal chemistry of quinolones and potent quinolone derivatives on the basis of structural activity relationship are outlined. Moreover, their major methods and modifications are discussed.