Editorial: Design, Synthesis, and Preclinical Testing of Innovative Anti-Cancer Compounds With a High Level of Selectivity of Action and Low Toxicity
Ana Maria da Costa Ferreira, Regine Schneider‐Stock, Francesca Aiello · Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences · 2022
Design, Synthesis, and Preclinical Testing of Innovative Anti-Cancer Compounds With a High Level of Selectivity of Action and Low ToxicityThe searching for novel anti-cancer compounds has deserved much interest in the literature, and many efforts from different groups around the world were spent in the last decades to develop them.Diverse used approaches focused both small organic molecules as well as corresponding metallated ligands, at their reactivity toward a range of biological targets.In this Research Topic of Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, under the title Design, Synthesis, and Preclinical Testing of Innovative Anti-Cancer Compounds we intended to motivate publications in innovative anticancer compounds, aiming to reach high level of selectivity and low toxicity.Despite of only a few articles reached these goals, they are representative of recent improvements in the field.Such studies utilized advanced methodology, in accordance with recommended recent procedures in the literature.Three of the published works focus on metal compounds of ruthenium, copper and/or platinum.Metalation usually improve the activity of ligands, providing charge and facilitating their uptake by the cells.Also, the binding of metal ions to those ligands favored an specific conformation, frequently assisting its interaction with main targets as DNA or the active sites of proteins co-involved in crucial processes.On the other hand, coordinated ligands modify the metal reduction potential, by modification of the reduced/oxidized species ratio, and so influencing the oxidative processes that usually occurs more intensely in tumor cells.The continuous progress of studies based on metal complexes in the last decades, included some compounds tested in clinical trials.In The Influence of Some Axial Ligands on Ruthenium-Phthalocyanine Complexes: Chemical, Photochemical, and Photobiological Properties (Martins et al.), the authors prepared and described chemical and photochemical properties of ruthenium-phthalocyanine complexes, particularly transisomers.Ruthenium is one of the most studied metals in the development of metallodrugs for cancer, particularly due its photochemical reactivity and kinetic characteristics that can differentiate its modes of action.Usually, the possible substitution of ligands in biological medium interferes considerably in the anticancer activity of ruthenium complexes and this fact is more important than the reduction of the metal.Usually, the possible substitution of ligands in biological medium interferes considerably in the anticancer activity of ruthenium complexes.And this point is more important than the reduction of the metal.Particularly, results for one of the compounds studied