Interaction Studies of Metal-Based Anticancer Drug Entities with Potential Therapeutic Targets

Interaction studies of small-molecule drug candidates or metal-based drugs with their therapeutic target biomolecules viz., DNA, RNAs, proteins, etc., have attracted considerable attention for the use in the treatment of many chronic diseases such as infectious diseases, HIV AIDS, diabetes, and cancers. Metal-based drugs offer the most promising opportunities due to interesting physicochemical and redox properties, being highly positively charged are, therefore amenable to myriad binding sites in their helices by various non-covalent and covalent binding modes in varying binding affinities. Most often, they cause subtle changes in their secondary structure leading to damage in structure, and disrupting the essential genetic transcription functions. These binding features have been monitored by a battery of usually, complimentary biophysical techniques, and various parameters are quantified, determining their binding propensity, etc. In this chapter, details of interaction studies have been described in detail, giving the readers a comprehensive picture of binding modes for the design of new tailored innovative target-specific drugs that are well-suited to specific binding sites or domains of biomolecular targets.