Metalloporphyrin Research Makes Strides in Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Porphyrins are the kinds of molecules that stir the imagination of a chemist. Fairly large heterocycles, they nevertheless retain an elegant simplicity inherent in their flat, aromatic, symmetric structure. And porphyrins, with their four nitrogen atoms arranged in a square around a central void, seem designed to bind metals, which they do with great facility. Porphyrins have a structure that nature has harnessed with great success. Metalloporphyrins are ubiquitous in enzymes and other proteins essential to life. Chemists, who so often take their cues from nature, have been probing the properties of metalloporphyrins for many years, and one active area of research is on biomedical applications. The chemistry of metalloporphyrins—research that ranges from basic inorganic chemistry to medicinal chemistry—was the subject of a week-long symposium at the recent national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Los Angeles. Sponsored by the Division of Inorganic Chemistry, the symposium attracted chemists of...