Synthesis of Water-Soluble Group 4 Metallocene and Organotin Polyethers and Their Ability to Inhibit Cancer

Abstract

Water-soluble metallocene and organotin-containing polyethers were synthesized employing interfacial polycondensation. The reaction involved various chain lengths of poly(ethylene glycol), and produced water-soluble polymers in decent yield. Commercially available reactants were used to allow for easy scale up. The polymers exhibited a decent ability to inhibit a range of cancer cell lines, including two pancreatic cancer cell lines. This approach should allow the synthesis of a wide variety of other water-soluble polymers.

Creation of anticancer drugs employing metal-containing macromolecules

“…We have been working to overcome this. Our efforts at this have been recently reviewed [49]. Our primarily approach is the incorporation of poly (ethylene glycol) (PEG; also called poly (ethylene oxide), PEO) into the polymer chain to allow the polymer combination, copolymer, to become soluble.…”

“…We simply employed the PEG as the Lewis base in our reaction system. Recently, we similarly produced water soluble polymers containing titanocene, zirconocene, and hafnocene units [49,56,57]. Currently we are beginning synthesis of co-polymers aimed at producing water soluble products containing Lewis bases that exhibit outstanding biological activity so that these macromolecules will be available as water soluble drugs for testing and possibility eventually used more widely.…”

Use of metal-containing polymers as potential anticancer agents

“…More recently we described the synthesis of analogous metallocenecontaining polyethers [47][48][49].…”

Synthesis and self-assembly of corona-functionalised polymeric arsenical nanoparticles

“…[1,2] Synthetic strategies to produce polymeric arsenicals include; interfacial polycondensation reactions [3,4] and ring-collapsed radical alternating copolymerization (RCRAC) [5], which results in the formation of backbone functionalized polymeric arsenicals, whilst the use of vinyl-functionalised organic arsenical monomers [6] enables the formation side-chain functionalized polymeric arsenicals by free radical polymerization (FRP) [7,8]. The proposed applications of these polymers have ranged from macromolecular therapeutics (anti-virals, anti-bacterials, anti-cancer) [9][10][11][12][13][14] to energy materials (semi-conducting, optics) [15,16] to flocculants [17] and surfactants (for nanoparticle stabilization) [18,19].…”