Description
Most approved therapeutics are organic compounds, however, metal complexes have the potential to offer more diverse properties that can be tuned in order to achieve specific functions [1]. Over the last three decades, there has been increasing interest in platinum complexes with N,S-donor ligands as thiourea derivatives. Such complexes may exhibit either higher anticancer activity or reduced toxicity compared to known metal containing drugs, such as cisplatin or carboplatin.
Platinum complexes with compounds containing three thiourea moieties in their structure (Fig. 1) were synthesized in order to compare their cytotoxic activities with those of initial ligands and reference drugs. The synthesized compounds have been structurally characterized by elemental analysis, ATR-IR, UV-Vis and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopies. More detailed information about the metal-thiourea ligand interaction has been obtained by applying the X-ray absorption spectroscopy (the ASTRA beamline). Density functional theory has been applied to determine the molecular structure of platinum complexes.
Figure 1. The molecular structure of initial thiourea ligands; R: phenyl or cyclohexyl.
The authors acknowledge SOLARIS Centre for the access to the ASTRA beamline, under the provision of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education project "Support for research and development with the use of research infra-structure of the National Synchrotron Radiation Centre SOLARIS” under contract no. 1/SOL/2021/2. We gratefully acknowledge Poland's high-performance Infrastructure PLGrid (ACK Cyfronet) for providing computer facilities and support within computational grant no. PLG/2022/015746.
Reference
[1] Chem. Soc. Rev., 2022, 51, 2544-2582.
