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.