Novel carbohydrate-based sulfonamide derivatives as selective carbonic anhydrase II inhibitors: Synthesis, biological and molecular docking analysis.

A series of sulfonamides containing glucosamine moieties had been prepared and investigated for the inhibition of the zinc enzyme carbonic anhydrases (CAs, EC 4.2.1.1). Compared to their parent compound p-sulfamoylbenzoic acid, target compounds showed two order of magnitude improvement in their binding affinities against hCA II in vitro. Moreover, they also showed great selectivity toward hCA II enzyme with the ratios for inhibiting hCA II over hCA I in the range 20-96 and for inhibiting hCA II over hCA IX in the range 4.3-9. Due to the introduction of glucosamine moieties, all of compounds displayed good water solubility (in the range of 2.0-2.5%) and the pH values of the obtained solutions is neutral (7.0-7.2). Compared to the clinically available and relatively highly acidic dorzolamide (pH 5.5), target compounds are more likely to be less irritating to the eye when applied to topical glaucomatous drugs. Then, cytotoxicity evaluation suggested that all target compounds did not display any appreciable toxicity against human cornea epithelial cell. In addition, molecular docking studies elucidated the binding modes of those compounds toward hCA II. Collectively, these results suggest that target compounds represented a promising scaffold to treat glaucoma without major topical side effects.