Inorganic Compounds in Medicine, Cancer Therapy and Beyond – an Update from Drug Design Perspective

Dear Colleagues,

Metal complexes have a crucial role in the anticancer therapy nowadays, and even with the emergence of novel chemotherapeutical treatments, the employment of metallodrugs will remain the key instrument in the struggle against the cancer. A plethora of both Pt- and non-Pt-based anticancer metal complexes have been developed. For example, gold complexes display exceptional cytotoxicity, and some ruthenium complexes inhibit metastases of solid invasive tumors. Analogously, arsenic, though well known as potent poison, when administered as oxide (As2O3) is widely used as potent and effective agent to treat promyelocytic leukemia. Additionally, several Gd, Ge, Ti, Ga-based complexes are now at the stage of human clinical trials. Thus, on one hand, various metal complexes possess various modes of action, such as DNA binding, enzyme or protein targeting, redox modulation and targeting oncogenic signaling pathways. On the other hand, this peculiar versatility makes metal -or metalloids- suitable for a wide array of medicinal application in several fields including anticancer, antimicrobial, antiparasitic and antiviral therapy.

On the ground of these considerations, metal complexes present a myriad of unexplored features which make them perfect scaffolds for drug development. Their rational design includes fine-tuning of their structure with the aim to reach the intended biological effects, indeed, various metal centers possess different physicochemical properties, which include redox potentials, binding preferences to biomolecules, and kinetics of ligand exchange.

This Special Issue aims to collect the most recent advances on the topics related to anticancer metal complexes, their synthesis, characterization and biological evaluation, both experimental and computational. Furthermore, contribution dealing with the development of inorganic compounds for medicinal applications beyond the anticancer therapy are also welcome.

Dr. Tiziano Marzo
Dr. Iogann Tolbatov
Guest Editors

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