Andreia Valente
Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa Lisboa Portugal
Title: On the mode of action of new promising anticancer agents: multifunctional polymer-ruthenium conjugates
Biography
Biography: Andreia Valente
Abstract
A new family of multifunctional polymer-ruthenium conjugatesfor targeted delivery of chemotherapeutic agents has been synthesized and tested as anticancer agents. These drugs might provide potential tools to surmount many of the current limitations in conventional chemotherapy, including undesirable biodistribution, cancer cell drug resistance and severe systemic side effects. Our approach constitutes an innovation relatively to other high molecular drugs reported in the literature mainly because an exact control of the amount of our cytotoxic drug in the polymeric chain is achievable due to our fine tune functionalization of the polymers (other approaches use a variable percentage of metal per quantity of drug). Studies of drug speciation in blood, cytotoxicity, apoptosis, autophagy, proliferation, in vitro drug internalization and release studies and ultrastructure analysis of cells led to the identification of a lead compound that has been subjected to in vivo studies in nude mice. In vivo studies comprise pharmacokinetics by controlling the amount of metal (Ru) in organs, tumor, blood and urine of mice. Hematological and biochemical parameters of the animals were evaluated as well as tumor regression and metastasis inhibition.