Photoactivatable metal complexes: exciting potential in biotechnology and medicine?

Peter Sadler obtained his BA, MA and DPhil at the University of Oxford. Subsequently he was a Medical Research Council Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and National Institute for Medical Research. From 1973-96 he was Lecturer, Reader and then Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and from 1996-2007 Crum Brown Chair of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh. In June 2007 he took up a Chair in Chemistry at the University of Warwick. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and the Royal Society of London (FRS), a European Research Council Advanced Investigator, and Mok Hing Yiu Distinguished Visiting Professor in Chemistry at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests are centred on the chemistry of metals in medicine.

Nicola Farrer received her degree (Natural Sciences, 2003) and subsequently her PhD (2007) from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral work involved developing readily ionisable phosphine ligands with a view to detecting catalytic intermediates by electrospray mass spectrometry, and was supervised by Prof. Brian Johnson (University of Cambridge), with the bulk of the analytical work undertaken in the lab of Dr. Scott McIndoe (University of Victoria, Canada). She returned to the UK to join the group of Professor Peter Sadler at the University of Warwick as a post-doctoral fellow in September 2007, working on one- and two-photon photoactivatable metal complexes for application as anti-cancer prodrugs. Her research interests also include multinuclear NMR spectroscopy and chemical applications of photonic crystal fibres. In 2010 she was awarded Chartered Chemist status by the Royal Society of Chemistry. She is currently taking a career break, following the birth of her son James in October 2010.

Akhil R Chakravarty received his PhD (1982) from the Calcutta University on a thesis titled “Aspects of the chemistry of ruthenium complexes” under the supervision of Professor Animesh Chakravorty at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Calcutta. He later joined Texas A&M University (USA) as a post-doctoral fellow under the supervision of Professor F A Cotton and studied bimetallic complexes having metal-metal multiple bonds. He joined Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, India, in 1985 as an assistant professor and currently is a Professor in the department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry.  He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (FASc), Indian National Science Academy (FNA) and Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (FTWAS). He has received the S S Bhatnagar Award and is a J C Bose national fellow. He has guided 20 PhD students and published 200 research papers in peer reviewed journals. His research interests are primarily focused on the development of the chemistry of metal-based photocytotoxic agents using bio-essential 3d metal ions.