Construction of Well-Defined Discrete Metallacycles and Their Biological Applications

Through the facile and efficient coordination-driven self-assembly, a series of well-defined discrete metallacycles with diverse structures and well-tuned functional groups have been successfully constructed. The existence of the biological active metal complexes that serve as the key components endows the resultant metallacycles wide biological applications such as anticancer, DNA binding, bioimaging, drug delivery, photodynamic therapy, etc. In this chapter, classified by the varied metallic building blocks such as Pd, Pt, Ru, Rh, Ir, etc. in the resultant metallacycles, an overview of their biological applications is provided. In each section, the emphasis focuses on the design strategy of building blocks and the biological applications.