Half-Sandwich RuII Complex Bearing a Nitrogen Donor Ligand: Biological Investigations

Today, cancer is considered as the second most life threatening factor and many efforts havebeen made to overcome cancer. Among them, metallotherapeutics have been shown great anticanceractivity and can prevent the rapid proliferation of cancer cells. Ruthenium-basedcompounds can be a good candidate for chemotherapy and clinical development. Because thesecomplexes have acceptable biological properties, low cytotoxicity, fewer side effects and aremore selective for cancer cells than normal cells. It has been shown that RuII–arene complexesinclude N^N donor ligands can form adducts with DNA at G۷ and these interactions usuallyoccur between arene and DNA.As showed in Scheme ۱, the reaction of [Ru(p-cymene)Cl(μ-Cl)]۲, A, via ۴-methylbipyrimidine-۲-N-oxide (bpyNO) at room temperature afforded a new RuII complex[Ru(p-cymene)(bpyNO)Cl], ۱. This complex was characterized by means of severalspectroscopic and analytical techniques such as NMR and HR ESI-Mass. Also, the in vitrocytotoxicity effect of ۱ was investigated against a panel of cancer cell lines.