In addition to what has been said thus far about the use of coordination complexes as an anti-cancer drug, I would also like to propose another way for drugs to be delivered by this method. Before Gabriella's lecture, when Dr. Soria had us propose a boron-containing compound that could be used for neutron capture therapy, I reached into my knowledge of inorganic chem to propose something that I thought would be "different". So I devised a compound that consisted of a metallic center with three bidentate ligands. The compound was set up in such a way that after boron would exhibit radioactive decay, the compound would deteriorate into LiOH, CO2, and a coordination complex with some combination of oxo, hydroxo, and aqua ligands. The design was such that before deterioration, the compound was lipid soluble, and after deterioration, water soluble, thereby enabling quick elimination from the body.
Later, after Gabriella's lecture, I continued thinking about the concept at hand, and wonderd if it would be possible to build upon the idea of metal complexes for drug delivery in the following manner:
Doctors can inject a relatively large amount of a metal complex with inactive drugs into a specific location in the body, then can trigger the release of the drugs by a noninvasive delivery of a small dose of a non-metallic compound that will undergo ligand exchange with the metal complex, thereby releasing a small amount of the drugs. The parameters needed are that the ligands on the metal complex must be strong than water, yet weaker than the triggering compound. The metal complex will deliver the drug to the specific surounding area of where it was injected, and this injection need only be performed rarely, whereas the triggering compound can be taken orally as needed. This method can be used to provide frequent drug delivery in a highly specific manner (physical specificity) while minimizing the number of dangerous, invasive injections needed (into the brain, for example).
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My undergraduate research was in metal boron hydride clusters. We used BNCT as a rationale for the synthesis of the new complexes. The drugs designed for BNCT typically consist of clusters of boron. Boron naturally forms cages. These cages contain 10-12 boron atoms so this allows the delivery of a large number of boron atoms. Sometimes, one boron in the cage is replaced by a transition metal that can serve as a vertex point of the cage and also bind to other ligands that may be useful in drug delivery. Again, the variable oxidation state of transition metals allows the change in coordination number.
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