Investigation of antitumor activity of ag-n-heterocyclic carbene complexes

N-Heterocyclic carbenes (NHC) are of great interest in recent years, and have a strong nucleophilic character and are capable of stable binding to transition metals. These ligands, which are generally used in catalytic applications, have begun to be used in clinical applications due to their biological activity in recent years. One of the areas where metal NHC complexes are most active today is bioorganometallic chemistry. The development of metal-based drugs used in the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases constitutes an important area in which many metal NHC complexes work in this area. N-Heterocyclic carbenes have high stability in the ligands they have made with metals, and their easy derivatization makes carbides a suitable candidate for drug development. Recently, the use of NHC metal complexes has been increased in antimicrobial and more recently as therapeutic antitumor agents. Therefore, new Ag-N-heterocyclic carbene complexes have been synthesized and antitumor activities have been investigated. The results of this study could be summarized in three main sections: 1) In the first part, 1,3-dialkylbenzimidazolium(1a-c), propil-3-sulphonate benzimidazolium (2a-b) and buthyl-4-sulphonatebenzimidazolium(3) salts were synthesized and their structure were elucidated spectroscopic techniques. 2) In the second part, benzimidazol-2-ylidene (4a-c), propyl-3-sulphonatebenzimidazol-2-ylidene (5) and butyl-4sulphonate benzimidazol-2-ylidene silver(I) (6) complexes were synthesized from reaction of Ag2O with benzimidazolium salts, and all complexes were structurally elucidated by means of spectroscopy. 3) The antitumor activities of the obtained Ag-NHC complexes were investigated. Antitumor activities of these complexes were determined by MTS cytotoxicity test in healthy fibroblast cell line (L-929), liver cancer cell line (Hep3B) and brain cancer cell line (SH-SY5Y) depending on dose (15-100 μM) and sun (1-3 days).