Editorial: Metals in medicine

Editorial on the Research Topic Metals in medicineThe field of metal-based pharmaceuticals (metallodrugs) is one of the main research areas in bioinorganic chemistry.Metallodrugs have drawn great attention for their value as therapeutic and diagnostic agents for cancer, bipolar disorder, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and as treatments for other maladies.Platinum-based anticancer agents are some of the most widely used metallodrugs and are important components in more than 50% of cancer chemotherapies.However, limitations, such as their toxic side effects and drug resistance, initiated the development of new metallodrugs with different modes of action.Nowadays, inorganic medicinal chemists are focusing on the design of transition metal anticancer agents that might be effective against a wider range of cancers, have less side effects, have different mechanisms of action, and therefore be effective against platinum-resistant cancers and cancer types that are not responsive to current chemotherapeutics.This Research Topic aims to highlight the potential of metallodrugs and to present the reader with the latest progress of metallodrugs in the discipline of medicinal inorganic chemistry.In this Research Topic, excellent works cover fundamental research on drug design and synthesis, structure-activity relationships, mechanistic studies, as well as important applications such as bioimaging, sensing, anticancer and antibacterial compounds.Very recently, both half-sandwich and cyclometallated Ir III complexes have drawn increasing attention as promising anticancer agents (Wang C. et al., 2017;Wang L. et al., 2021).With the help of confocal microscopy, scientists were able to observe cellular images of non-fluorescent half-sandwich Ir III complexes, which significantly improved understanding towards their anticancer mechanisms (Li et al., 2018).Xu et al. report on cyclometallated Ir III complexes containing natural coumarin derivatives, which showed potent anticancer activity against A549 cells with slight selectivity over normal cells.Mechanistic studies covering cell cycle arrest, intracellular ROS levels and mitochondrial membrane depolarization, etc., indicated that the iridium complex caused higher apoptosis levels in cancer cells than in normal cells.Cellular localization investigations demonstrate that the complex accumulates in lysosomes over other organelles, and then triggers lysosome-mediated apoptosis in A549 cells.

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