Curcumin Biowaste Valorization with Microwave–Ultrasonic Energy-Efficient Irradiation Techniques Afford Sustainable Heterocyclic Compounds as Antibacterial and Anticancer Agents Supported by QSAR/DFT

Efficient green approach and control with microwave-ultrasonic techniques (MW/US) suit ecofriendly synthesis and environmentally chemical degradation. Curcumin’s degradation is not merely a loss of activity, and it generates a spectrum of bioactive compounds. Oxidative products often enhance therapeutic potential due to the values from turmeric waste streams, aligning sustainable vanillin and ferulic acid extraction, which are valuable bioactive intermediates. It can be increasingly the yield economy with reduce environmental impact and improve reaction mass efficiency. One-pot reactions involving glycine can yield oxazole derivatives, which serve as key starting materials in the synthesis of nitrogen-containing diverse heterocycles. This study addresses the urgent oxidized curcumin need for the therapeutic agents against drug resistance in infectious diseases and cancer. Reaction monitoring and product verification involved TLC, IR, MS, NMR, and elemental analysis for comprehensive characterization. The synthesized of new compounds (1 to 9) showed significant antibacterial activity as comparable to ciprofloxacin. Furthermore, the data reveals that synthesized compounds 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 have promising anticancer HepG-2 potential. IC50 of the most potent synthesized compound 9 in vitro anticancer activity was (1.24 μM) that is lower than reference erlotinib (2.97 μM). In the compound 9, the selectivity indexes were >7 for HepG2 cells and >9 for MCF7 cells at IC50 after 72 hs. The suggestions for improving the compounds align well with the established principles in drug design and QSAR modeling. Complementary techniques like density functional theory (DFT) calculations are useful to understand electronic properties at a molecular level and support the identification of promising bioactive compounds.