Newly Synthesized Citral Derivatives Serve as Novel Inhibitor in HepG2 Cells

2H-pyran compound 1 synthesized from 6-methylpyridine-2,4-diol and citral, has been used for Cu-catalyzed N-arylation with a range of arylboric acids to obtain arylated pyranopyridine core structure derivatives (yield up to 77 %). Among them, compound 3 h exhibited a much better inhibitory effect on HepG2 liver cancer cells compared to citral, and the IC₅₀ value was 5.3 μM following exposure with the newly synthesized derivatives (herein named 3 h for short in this paper), which was lower than that of the cisplatin (6.5 μM). Meanwhile, the cell-cycle arrest of HepG2 cells occurred in the S phase, and the apoptosis of HepG2 cells was significantly increased with increasing drug concentration. In addition, real-time fluorescence quantification PCR and Western blotting experiments showed that the expression of apoptotic protein BAX was increased, while the expression of anti-apoptotic protein BCL2 was inhibited in a dose-dependent fashion. The results of these experiments indicated that apoptosis was promoted in HepG2 cells via apoptotic signaling pathway activated by 3 h. Furthermore, 3 h effectively decreased the phosphorylation levels of PI3 K, ATK and ERK, resulting in the inhibitions of MAPK/ERK and PI3 K/ATK signaling pathways. Briefly, 3 h has been found to show inhibitory effects on the survival of HepG2 liver cancer cells and may be used as anti-cancer drug in the future.