Target based chemotherapeutic advancement of ruthenium complexes

Over the last few years, great emphasis has been given to develop ruthenium complexes to act as target specified chemotherapeutic agents. Indeed, there are few reviews available already, which summarized the literature based on cancer targeting ruthenium complexes before 2019. In this review, we summarized the research published from 2019, which is significant in numbers, focusing target specificity of organometallic ruthenium complexes towards various organelles (mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum, nucleus, microtubules, lysosome, golgi complex, etc), biomolecules including genetic material such as DNA, intracellular proteins, and various key enzymes (GSH, NADH, etc), which are upregulated in cancerous cells and provide a specific mechanistic pathway for cancer cell death. Moreover, structure activity relationship, technologies used for in vitro/in vivo imaging and involvement of nanocarriers towards cancer specific recognition have been discussed in short to expand the horizon of metal-based anticancer research. Herein, this review will give a broad idea to the readers about the selection of ruthenium complexes for approaching targeted chemotherapy.