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Mala Nath 1 and Hitendra Singh 1 and George Eng 2 and Xueqing Song 2
Recommended by N. Farfan and G. Giambastiani and J. R. Hwu
1, Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttrakhand, Roorkee 247667, India
2, Department of Chemistry and Physics, University of the District of Columbia, Washington, DC 20008, USA
Received 16 July 2012; Accepted 6 September 2012
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
The field of cancer chemotherapy has been developed enormously during the past fifty years. Prior to 1969, however, the arsenal of chemotherapeutic agents was devoid of compounds which are inorganic in nature because of generally accepted belief that most metals and their compounds were potentially carcinogenic [ 1]. In 1969, Rosenberg and his coworkers made the serendipitous discovery [ 2] that certain Pt compounds were potent antitumor agents against Sarcoma 180 tumors and L1210 leukemia in mice and must be considered to be an outstanding development in the field of metal compounds in medicine [ 3]. Cis -platin is the first drug from inorganic chemistry to have come under routine clinical use in medical oncology [ 3]; in 1986, it was the largest selling anticancer drug worldwide. Its success placed the co-ordination chemists on the front line in the fight against cancer and stimulated the search for other metal-containing compounds with potential anticancer activity. In last 20 years about more than 12000 complexes of 55 metals have been tested [ 4], many of them are now entering for clinical trials, and some may ultimately rival cis -platin [ 5- 7]. Although the majority of these successes involved complexes containing transition metal ions such as Cr, Co, Cu, Pd, Rh, Ru, and Au [ 5- 8], but some main group metals (i.e., Al, Ga, In, ad Tl; Ge, Sn, and Pb; Bi and Po) compounds [ 1], especially organotins, have also been discovered which show promise as future members of man's anticancer arsenal [ 9- 13]. Further, several organotin(IV) derivatives have been reported to exhibit good anti-inflammatory activity [ 14- 22].
The mechanism of mode of action of cis -platin...