Aurora-A has been identified as one of the most attractive targets for cancer 
therapy and a considerable number of Aurora-A inhibitors have been reported 
recently. In order to clarify the essential structure-activity relationship for 
the known Aurora-A inhibitors as well as identify new lead compounds against 
Aurora-A, 3D pharmacophore models were developed based on the known inhibitors. 
The best hypothesis, Hypo1, was used to screen molecular structural databases, 
including Specs and China Natural Products Database for potential lead 
compounds. The hit compounds were subsequently subjected to filtering by 
Lipinski's rules and docking study to refine the retrieved hits and as a result 
to reduce the rate of false positive. Finally, 39 compounds were purchased for 
further in vitro assay against several human tumour cell lines including A549, 
MCF-7, HepG2 and PC-3, in which Aurora-A is overexpressed. Two compounds show 
very low micromolar inhibition potency against some of these tumour cells. And 
they have been selected for further investigation.