Synthesis, chemical characterization and cancer cell growth-inhibitory activities of Cu(ii) and Ru(iii) aliphatic and aromatic dithiocarbamato complexes

The present paper is focused on the analysis of the effects mediated by different cyclic dithiocarbamic ligands (DTC) on three classes of antiproliferative coordination compounds, namely the Ru(III) complexes with general formulae [Ru(DTC)3] and [Ru2(DTC)5]Cl, and the neutral Cu(II) derivatives of the type [Cu(DTC)2]. In particular, the authors present the synthesis and characterization of a library of total 23 coordination compounds containing the Ru(III) or Cu(II) biologically-active metal center) and two or more dithiocarbamato (DTC) ligands, derived from cyclic amines (aliphatic or aromatic). Several techniques (elemental analysis, X-ray crystallography, ESI-MS, 1H-NMR spectroscopy, FT-IR and UV-Vis spectrophotometries) were used to characterize the compounds, highlighting different electronic behaviors generated by the substituents within the DTC moiety. Moreover, the synthetized compounds were tested for their stability in order to investigate their antiproliferative activity against 3 human cancer cell lines, namely HeLa, HepG2 and HepG2/SB3. In particular, the last one was chosen for its aggressiveness, due to the upregulation of the anti-apoptotic protein SerpinB3. Finally, the most promising compounds were studied in terms of logP. Overall, the results point out the drug likeness of some derivatives of copper(II) and ruthenium(III).