2-Pyrazol-1-yl-thiazole derivatives as novel highly potent antibacterials

The present report describes our efforts to identify new structural classes of compounds having promising antibacterial activity using previously published double-reporter system pDualrep2. This semi-automated high-throughput screening (HTS) platform has been applied to perform a large-scale screen of a diverse small-molecule compound library. We have selected a set of more than 125,000 molecules and evaluated them for their antibacterial activity. On the basis of HTS results, eight compounds containing 2-pyrazol-1-yl-thiazole scaffold exhibited moderate-to-high activity against ΔTolC Escherichia coli. Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values for these molecules were in the range of 0.037–8 μg ml−1. The most active compound 8 demonstrated high antibacterial potency (MIC = 0.037 μg ml−1), that significantly exceed that measured for erythromycin (MIC = 2.5 μg ml−1) and was comparable with the activity of levofloxacin (MIC = 0.016 μg ml−1). Unfortunately, this compound showed only moderate selectivity toward HEK293 eukaryotic cell line. On the contrary, compound 7 was less potent (MIC = 0.8 μg ml−1) but displayed only slight cytotoxicity. Thus, 2-pyrazol-1-yl-thiazoles can be considered as a valuable starting point for subsequent optimization and morphing.