fakultet 42

530 R. WYSOKIŃSKI

ABSTRACT

Cancer therapy is one of most the challenging tasks for medicine at the end of this century. The subject of discussion in this paper is cisplatin which about thirty years ago has awaked a hope for an effective treatment of cancer. The foliowing problems have been reviewed: the efTect of various substituents on the biological activity of the compounds: cz's-PtAm₂X₂ (where Am is ammine or aminę and X is an anionie group), the mechanism of action of cisplatin and the structures of its coordination compounds with DNA. The side effects of cisplatin therapy, in particular its nefrotoxicity, and the attempts to establish the structure-activity relationship have also been discussed. The second and third generation of platinum-based drugs are presented, including the cisplatin drugs which are joint with some biologically active compounds. They act as the vectors delivering the drug directly to the cancerous cells, hereby decreasing toxicity of these drugs.