Suitability of in vivo and in vitro models for assessing on the safety of natural and industrial products

Abstract

The excellent thermal and chemical stability and robustness of ECE-pincer metal complexes make these species promising candidates as medical and therapeutics tools; tools such as: biomarkers, sensors, anticarcinogenic agents, surface plasmon resonance enhancers, etc. In this sense, one of the main interests is the hybridization of organometallic species anchored or incorporated in biological molecules, i.e., mainly in enzymes. Also of interest is the preparation of dendritic ECE-pincer metal complexes as potential drug carriers. Thus far, several papers describing dendrimeric skeletons (e.g., PAMAM) have been reported with promising drug delivery abilities. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no reports describing the utilization of dendritic ECE-pincer metal complexes as drug carriers.In addition, an incipient development of bioorganometallic conjugates, combining the properties of ECE-pincer metal complexes covalently anchored to diverse biological molecules (peptides, aminoacids, carbohydrates, anticarcinogenic agents, proteins, enzymes, etc.), have been synthetized in an effort to generate potential sensors or biomarkers, exploiting the properties of the biomolecules used (water solubility, size, chiral environment, etc.).In this chapter, we describe the development of metallopincer dendrimers and the potential applications of more compact metallopincer species in medical, therapeutic, and other fields.