SwissADME Predictions of Drug-Likeness of 5-Nitro Imidazole Derivatives as Potential Antimicrobial and Antifungal Agents

Structure modification of existing drugs by incorporating different pharmacophores can enhance the biological profile and may impart new activities. The main objective of this work was to incorporate biologically active benzimidazole pharmacophore to metronidazole at the 2nd position without modifying the nitro group. Eleven compounds were designed and synthesized as per literature with little modification. The synthesized compounds were evaluated for antibacterial and antifungal activity by standard disc diffusion and agar well diffusion method respectively. Theoretical ADME values of the synthesized compounds were also calculated to seek their drug-likeness as antimicrobial agents. In particular, four of the eleven new derivatives (IIb), (IIg), (IIh), and (IIi) showed comparable antibacterial activity against all bacterial strains and two of the derivatives (IIb) and (IIi) showed potential antifungal activity against candida species even more than that of the standard drug. The theoretical prediction of ADME parameters suggests no violation of Lipinski's rule of five. Thus, it can be predicted that the newly synthesized derivatives may possess a good pharmacokinetic profile.