Synthesis, crystal structure, and urease inhibition of an end-on azido-bridged dinuclear copper(II) complex with an oxidized tridentate Schiff base ligand

The Most Up-to-Date Advancements in the Design and Development of Urease Inhibitors (January 2020-March 2024)

The aim of this review is to address the most up-to-date information on the design and development, structure-activity relationship (SAR), and molecular docking study of novel and effective urease inhibitors between January 2020 and March 2024. Herein, the importance of the substituents and their effect on bioactivity of the reported compounds have been investigated. Besides, the relation between the most important residues inside the active site of the urease enzyme for interactions of the inhibitors and the active site of the enzyme has also been reviewed. This review has been classified into main reported scaffolds, namely, barbiturates, thiobarbiturates, Schiff bases, semicarbazides, thiosemcarbazides, benzimidazoles, 1,3,4-thiadiazoles, and 1,3,4-oxadiazoles, to provide better insight into the newly developed urease inhibitors.

Recent Efforts in the Discovery of Urease Inhibitor Identifications

Urease is an attractive drug target for designing anti-infective agents against pathogens such as Helicobacter pylori, Proteus mirabilis, and Ureaplasma urealyticum. In the past century, hundreds of medicinal chemists focused their efforts on explorations of urease inhibitors. Despite the FDA's approval of acetohydroxamic acid as a urease inhibitor for the treatment of struvite nephrolithiasis and the widespread use of N-(n-butyl)thiophosphoric triamide as a soil urease inhibitor as nitrogen fertilizer synergists in agriculture, urease inhibitors with high potency and safety are urgently needed. Exploration of novel urease inhibitors has therefore become a hot research topic recently. Herein, inhibitors identified worldwide from 2016 to 2021 have been reviewed. They structurally belong to more than 20 classes of compounds such as urea/thioure analogues, hydroxamic acids, sulfonamides, metal complexes, and triazoles. Some inhibitors showed excellent potency with IC50 values lower than 10 nM, having 10000-fold higher potency than the positive control thiourea.