One Step Closer to New Drug Development!... Professor Cho Jaeheung's Team at UNIST Identifies Reactivity of Cobalt Compounds

Potential of Cobalt Compounds for New Anticancer Drug Development Confirmed

Correlation Between Metal Spin State and Nitrile Reactivity Revealed

The UNIST research team has discovered how cobalt-based metal compounds react with nitrile substances, thereby increasing the potential for new drug development.

The team led by Professor Cho Jaehung from the Department of Chemistry at UNIST (President Park Jongrae) has elucidated the mechanism of nitrile activation reactions in biomimetic compounds using cobalt.

Research team. (From the bottom left: Professor Jaeheung Cho, Researcher Seonghan Kim, Researcher Yuri Lee)

In particular, they confirmed that the spin state of the metal has a significant effect on the reactivity. This finding reveals that even minor changes in the properties of the metal can greatly influence the speed and efficacy of chemical reactions.

The researchers analyzed how nitrile reacts by controlling the structure of cobalt compounds using a system called the 'macrocyclic pyridinophane coordination system.' Compounds containing a bulky adamantyl group exhibited efficient nitrile activation reactions.

In contrast, compounds with a smaller methyl group did not undergo the reaction. This is because the size of the functional group alters the spin state of the metal, resulting in differences in reactivity.

Although nitrile is widely used in pharmaceuticals and pesticides, it is generally difficult to react. However, it was confirmed that cobalt-peroxo species can react with nitrile at room temperature to form specific compounds, which have the potential to be developed as anticancer agents in the future.

Different spin states of cobalt-peroxo species with different ligands and their nitrile activation reactions.

First author Kim Sunghan said, "We succeeded in synthesizing cobalt-peroxo species with different spin states by modifying the steric effects of the ligands, and demonstrated that nitrile activation reactions are closely related to these spin states."

Professor Cho Jaehung stated, "Controlling the spin state of cobalt-peroxo species is of great academic significance and will suggest a new direction for the development of metal catalysts."

This research was conducted in collaboration with Professor Roithova from Radboud University in the Netherlands and Professor Lee Sungki from DGIST. Supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea under the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the results were published online in the international journal 'Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS)' on July 20.

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