Decision making for promising quinoline‐based anticancer agents through combined methodology

During the development of effective drugs for the treatment of cancer, one of the most important tasks is to identify effective drug candidates having maximum antiproliferation and minimum side effects. This paper considers the problem of selecting the most promising anticancer agents, showing inhibition at low IC₅₀ concentration and low releasing lactate dehydrogenase percentage (cytotoxicity). Recently, we prepared quinoline analogs bearing different functional groups and determined their anticancer potential against the HeLa, C6, and HT29 cancer cell lines using different anticancer assays. Experimentally, seven quinoline derivatives consisting of different substituents were determined as promising anticancer agents. We propose a multicriteria recommendation method to identify the most promising anticancer agents against all tested cell lines with an accurate prediction algorithm according to the available input data. A multicriteria decision‐making methodology (MCDM) was used for the solution of the relevant problem in this study. Both the experimental results and MCDM method indicated that 5,7‐dibromo‐8‐hydroxyquinoline ( 2 ) and 6,8‐dibromo‐1,2,3,4‐tetrahydroquinoline ( 6 ) are the most promising anticancer agents against the HeLa, HT29, and C6 cell lines.