PhD project in Bespoke Organometallic Compounds for Anticancer Studies

Organometallic compounds, complexes bearing a M-C bond, constitute a highly important class that find uses in a multitude of areas. Various globally significant applications, for example, developing new drugs for medicinal chemistry can attribute their huge success to the diversity of ancillary ligands that can be incorporated to access libraries of organometallic compounds possessing similar structural features.

We have been interested, for many years, in studying the chemistry of various organometallic compounds based primarily on late transition metals such as ruthenium, rhodium, iridium, palladium, and platinum to name but a few. Ideal spectator ligands, complimentary to those aforementioned target metals, often include specific Group 15 donor atoms incorporating nitrogen or phosphorus centres that can firmly anchor these metal centres.

In this exciting project, we will use synthetic methodologies developed in our research group to prepare novel families of (i) New fluorescent Schiff base chelating ligands and (ii) Preorganised fluorescent diphosphane ligands with unique bridging capabilities for anchoring two organometallic metal centres. Once synthesised and characterised, these compounds will be systematically evaluated for their cytotoxic properties.

This project will provide an excellent training opportunity, for a prospective PhD candidate, in modern well-equipped laboratories with access to multinuclear NMR facilities, X-ray crystallography, fluorescence spectroscopy, elemental imaging and bio lab testing facilities.