Exploring the anticancer potential of nitrated N-substituted-4-hydroxy-2-quinolone-3-carboxamides: synthesis, biological assessment, and computational analysis.

Cancer remains the second leading cause of mortality globally, necessitating the development of novel therapeutic agents. In this work, we synthesized 34 derivatives of nitrated N-substituted-4-hydroxy-2-quinolone-3-carboxamides, which were spectroscopically analyzed using FT-IR, NMR (H and C), and elemental analysis. Derivatives tailored with m-CF (10), m-OCH (13), m-Cl (16), and m-F (20) benzyl moiety exhibited distinctive cytotoxicity against human colon cancer (HCT-116) cells with IC of 23.