Dehydroabietic acid (DHA), which is a natural occurring
diterpenic resin acid, has been found to have properties of increasing the inhibition activity of an anticancer drug in various cells, e.g. cervical carcinoma cells, hepatocellular carcinoma cells,
and breast cancer cells, as well as its analogs [7]. Therefore DHA
skeleton was chosen as active pharmacal core to screen for new
potential antitumor compounds by the introduction of various
functional groups [8e11]. In previous work, it has been found that
the introduction of sulfocarbamide on ring B and C [8,12], as well
as in carboxylic acid group of DHA showed improved antitumor
activity [9]. Furthermore, aminophosphonates groups are able to
better improve the antitumor activity and many aminophosphonates
derivatives have shown good inhibition activities
against human tumors [13e16]. However, to the best of our
knowledge, the studies on the synthesis, antitumor activities and
apoptosis-inducing effects of thiourea a-aminophosphonate derivatives
derivated from DHA have not been explored. So in this
paper, functional groups thiourea and a-aminophosphonate
groups were rationally designed and introduced to the carboxylic
acid part of DHA skeleton to offer a series of novel thiourea aaminophosphonate
derivatives containing DHA. Their cytotoxicity
in vitro against four selected tumor cell lines were evaluated.
Results showed that the target compounds can inhibit proliferation
of these four tumor cell lines at moderate to high rates.
Preliminary investigation on the mode of action of compound 5f
found that it can effectively induce cell apoptosis in A549 cells.