New approaches for medicinal applications of bioinorganic chemistry

Inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry have made important contributions to medical science and human health in the past half century. Today, metal-containing imaging agents and therapeutics constitute a multi-billion dollar industry. Recent discoveries in bioinorganic chemistry of potential biomedical importance include the use of metal ions as synthetic scaffolds for the preparation of small molecule therapeutics, which opens up a new route to molecular structure and diversity, as well as the examination of metal-organic frameworks as biological imaging and drug delivery agents. These areas represent some of the most recent and still relatively unexplored themes in inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry that might be exciting and fruitful topics of study for the community interested in ‘metals in medicine’.