“…Sulphonated manganese-and iron-porphyrins have been developed in our laboratory for mimicking ligninase (Labat & Meunier, 1989) or chloroperoxidase (Labat & Meunier, 1990), and as biomimetic catalysts for the oxidation of pollutants or drugs (Bernadou et al, 1991;Vidal et al, 1993;Gaggero et al, 1994). The manganese complex of meso-tetrasulphonatophenylporphyrin (l-Mn; Table 1) has also been studied by several groups as a contrastenhancing agent for tumour imaging by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging (Megnin et al, 1987;Fiel et al, 1990). No toxicity of l-Mn was observed to the human breast cancer cell line MCF-7 at 0.1 mg mL-l (Megnin et al,1987).…”