An in-vitro and in Silico Anticancer Study of FDA Approved Antidiabetic Drugs Glimepiride and Empagliflozin

Drug repurposing is the way to find the role of the drug for new disease. Mostly the drug already passes human trails and approved  by FDA. Many  studies  confirmed  the role of many  drugs in the treatment  of more  than one disease.  Present research was conducted to evaluate the anticancer potential of FDA approved antidiabetic drugs Glimepiride and Empagliflozin. Glimepiride binds to ATP-sensitive  potassium  channel receptors and reduces the potassium conductance  and Empagliflozin  is a sodium glucose co-transporter-2  (SGLT-2) inhibitor. As many anti-diabetic  drugs like meantime  proved to be good anticancer drug  so these  two  drugs  were  selected  for  the  present  study  as their  pharmacodynamics  and  pharmacokinetics  studies  are already reported and both showed no side-effect in human. The purpose of this study was to repurpose the Glimepiride and Empagliflozin as anticancer agents. In-vitro anticancer study was performed on two human cancer cell-lines MCF-7 and A549. To confirm the anticancer potential, the effect of these drugs on selected apoptotic proteins was studied in-silico. Both Glimepiride and Empagliflozin have significant anticancer activity on both the cell-lines but Empagliflozin seems to have better activity in-vitro. In-silico results indicated that both the drugs have significantly high activity towards apoptotic proteins. Although both the drug showed promising  results in in-vitro and in-silico studies but the further studies like in-vivo studies are also required  to prove these drugs as anticancer as well.