Ab initio structural study of 2-imino-4-thiazolidinone derivatives and their anti-proliferative activity against A549 and H460 human lung carcinoma cells

[Display omitted] •Comparison of different calculation methods on the structure of 2-iminothiazolidin-4-one.•Use of B3LYP/6–311++G (d,p) method for geometric optimization and molecular descriptor calculations.•Data normalization, dataset division.•QSAR modeling of 2-imino-4-thiazolidinone derivatives. This theoretical work focuses on the determination of structural properties of a series of 2-iminothiazolidin-4-one derivatives and of their anti-proliferative activity against A549 and H460 human lung carcinoma cells. First, we performed benchmarks on the 2-iminothiazolidin-4-one subunit in gas phase and in aqueous solvent using first principle approaches. These benchmarks validated the use of B3LYP/6–311++G(d,p) method for the accurate determination of the equilibrium structures, vibrational spectroscopy and properties of 2-iminothiazolidin-4-one derivatives. We applied this method to investigate these derivatives of interest. We also deduced their reactivity descriptors. Afterward, we used some of these descriptors to establish quantitative structure activity relationships models for such activity in aqueous phase. These models were obtained by multiple regression analysis procedures. The predictivity of our models was estimated using the leave-one-out method. In sum, our work should be useful to predict the inhibitory activity of this class of molecules and to fight against lung cancer.