Development of New Vanadium and Iron complexes for potential anticancer drugs

In recent years, metals based antitumor complexes have played an important role in chemotherapy. In this study, two new metal complexes - dioxovandium LVO2 and dichloroiron LFeCl2-have been synthesized. The dioxovanadium complex LVO2 is formed from the reaction between the ligand HL and VO(acac)2 in 1:1 molar ratio, while the dichloroiron complex was prepared from the reaction between ligand HL with FeCl2 in 1:2 molar ratio. Both new complexes have been characterized by FT -IR and UV -Vis.\nThe IR spectrum revealed the absorption band changes between the complexes and their ligand, and UV -Vis show d-d transitions for the iron complex and LMCT for the vanadium complex. Molecular structures of the two complexes have been determined by X-ray crystallography. The central metals (both vanadium and iron) have adopted distorted trigonal bipyramidal configurations. The ligand serves as tridentate providing two nitrogen and one oxygen atoms for coordination. The complexes with vanadium and iron central atoms have shown promising results in preclinical testing and have already been evaluated for enhancement of the anti-proliferative activity on PC3. All three compounds HL, LVO2, and LFeCh displayed high cytotoxicity toward prostate cancer cell line.