Ruthenium Complexes as Anticancer agents

It could be noted from the literature that the presence of the Ru(II) complexes is found to have anticancer activities. Ruthenium metal is known for a long time. But its discovery as a therapeutic agent has recently. Researchers are focused on the synthesis of ruthenium complexes. Ruthenium has to be incorporated in a complex to make it soluble in body fluids.In the search for anticancer active metal complexes several ruthenium complexes have been reported to be promising as anticancer drugs.Ruthenium also has three main properties that make ruthenium complexes well suited metal for medicinal application. i) Ligand exchange rate, ii) The ability of ruthenium to mimic iron in binding to certain biological molecules. iii) The range of accessible oxidation states. Since tris chelates of ruthenium complexes show intercalative properties with the DNA molecule in-vitro, our main objective was to synthesize several mononuclear ruthenium(II) complexes and evaluate them for in-vitro cytotoxic activity.