Investigation of Novel Benzoxazole-Oxadiazole Derivatives as Effective Anti-Alzheimer’s Agents: In Vitro and In Silico Approaches

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurological illness that is distinguished clinically by cognitive and memory decline and adversely affects the people of old age. The treatments for this disease gained much attention and have prompted increased interest among researchers in this field. As a springboard to explore new anti-Alzheimer’s chemical prototypes, the present study was carried out for the synthesis of benzoxazole-oxadiazole analogues as effective Alzheimer’s inhibitors. In this research work, we have focused our efforts to synthesize a series of benzoxazole-oxadiazole (1–19) and evaluating their anti-Alzheimer properties. In addition, the precise structures of synthesized derivatives were confirmed with the help of various spectroscopic techniques including 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR and HREI-MS. To find the anti-Alzheimer potentials of the synthesized compounds (1–19), in vitro acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE), inhibitory activities were performed using Donepezil as the reference standard. From structure-activity (SAR) analysis, it was confirmed that any variation found in inhibitory activities of both acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE) enzymes were due to different substitution patterns of substituent(s) at the variable position of both acetophenone aryl and oxadiazole aryl rings. The results of the anti-Alzheimer assay were very encouraging and showed moderate to good inhibitory potentials with IC50 values ranging from 5.80 ± 2.18 to 40.80 ± 5.90 µM (against AChE) and 7.20 ± 2.30 to 42.60 ± 6.10 µM (against BuChE) as compared to standard Donepezil drug (IC50 = 33.65 ± 3.50 µM (for AChE) and 35.80 ± 4.60 µM (for BuChE), respectively. Specifically, analogues 2, 15 and 16 were identified to be significantly active, even found to be more potent than standard inhibitors with IC50 values of 6.40 ± 1.10, 5.80 ± 2.18 and 6.90 ± 1.20 (against AChE) and 7.50 ± 1.20, 7.20 ± 2.30 and 7.60 ± 2.10 (against BuChE). The results obtained were compared to standard drugs. These findings reveal that benzoxazole-oxadiazole analogues act as AChE and BuChE inhibitors to develop novel therapeutics for treating Alzheimer’s disease and can act as lead molecules in drug discovery as potential anti-Alzheimer agents.