Recent Advances in Metal-Based Theranostic Agents: Anticancer and Cellular Localization

Abstract

Today, metal-based drugs that are luminescent are crucial to diagnosis and therapeutics. In anticancer research, a fluorescent compound possessing low cytotoxicity, high fluorescence properties, and organelle specificity would prove useful for diagnosing physiological disorders related to that organelle. In short, it can act as a real-time tracking bioimaging agent. Similarly, fluorescent compounds with high cytotoxic properties help in evaluating the cell death mechanism more accurately. So, nowadays design of anticancer metallodrugs has received great attention which exhibits the combined modalities of therapy and diagnostic imaging as so-called “theranostics” agents. Because theranostics deliver therapeutic drugs and diagnostic imaging agents at the same time within the same dose. As an alternative to platinum-based anticancer drugs, many metal-based compounds have been studied. However, their mechanistic pathways of cell death are still less explored. Again, maingroup metal probes are rare in bioimaging. Thus, encouraging findings from the pharmacological investigation of metal complexes offer an opportunity to explore how these transition and main group metal complexes can be used in "biomedical molecular imaging." As a result of this ongoing trend, our group has begun investigating the metal-based anticancer and bioimaging agents based on transition and main group metals with various bioactive ligands and a few of the systems exhibited very promising results1-7 . Here, I will focus on some of the recent results linked to luminescent metal-based chemistry and their biomedical applications.