Diego Montagner

My research is inserted in the big area of Bioinorganic Chemistry and it is placed at the interface between inorganic/medicinal chemistry and biology. It is focused on the development of new metal based drugs that could be selectively delivered and accumulated into the tumor cell and that interact with biologically-relevant macromolecules with different mechanism of action. In particolar we are interested in: 1) Pt(IV) prodrug complexes with targeted axial ligands; 2) Cu(II) complexes that interact with the DNA via different pathways; 3) Au(I) carbene complexes as antimicrobial compunds; 4) metal based complexes (Cu(II), Zn(II), Fe(III)) that act as metallo-nuclease enzymes. In my lab we design, synthetise and characterise with different spectroscopic techniques (multinuclear NMR, Mass, IR, UV, HPLC, AA) the metal based complexes. In combination with our national and international collaborators we will study and speculate on the mode of action, interaction with biomolecules and cytotoxic activity of the new metal-based drugs.