A French-Italian consortium of researchers has developed a facile and reproducible synthetic procedure to prepare, at room temperature, a new family of organometallic compounds (ferrabenzenes) which had remained elusive until now.

The groups of Prof. Fabio Marchetti and Filippo Lipparini at the University of Pise in Italy and the one of Prof. Gilles Gasser at the Institute of Chemistry for Life and Health Sciences at Chimie ParisTech-PSL could recently unveil an efficient synthetic pathway leading to a class of metallabenzenes, namely ferrabenzenes, that were up to now nearly unknown. Very importantly, the new compounds discovered were found to be air stable, possess adequate aqueous solubility and stability, and balanced hydrophilic/lipophilic profile. These compounds exhibited potent cytotoxicity in vitro against three cancer cell lines. The lead compound of this study stands out for its pronounced activity, attributed to disruption of cell redox homeostasis, and marked selectivity compared to two noncancerous cell lines.
Overall, this international collaborative study provides great hopes for the discovery of new classes of anticancer iron-based agents.

This work has been accepted for publication in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
The article is available here.