SAR, cardiac myocytes protection activity and 3D-QSAR studies of salubrinal and its potent derivatives.

Salubrinal is a selective inhibitor of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress and affords remarkable protection to cardiomyocytes. By studying the structure-activity relationship (SAR) of salubrinal, it was found that modification of the quinoline ring terminus and thiourea unit could confer the compound PP1-24 with markedly enhanced cardioprotective activity (EC50 ≤ 0.3 μM) that is 50-fold more potent than salubrinal. Comparative molecular field analysis (CoMFA) was performed using the obtained biological data and resulted in a statistically significant CoMFA model with high predictive power (q2 = 0.741, r2 = 0.991).