Peptides in Receptor-Mediated Radiotherapy: From Design to the Clinical Application in Cancers

Short peptides can show high affinity for specific receptors overexpressed on tumor cells. Some of these are already used in cancerology as diagnostic tools and others are in clinical trials for therapeutic applications. Therefore, peptides exhibit great potential as a diagnostic tool but also as an alternative or an additional antitumoral approach upon the covalent attachment of a therapeutic moiety such as a radionuclide or a cytotoxic drug. The chemistry offers flexibility to graft onto the targeting-peptide either fluorine or iodine directly, or metallic radionuclides through appropriate chelating agent. Since short peptides are straightforward to synthesize, there is an opportunity to further improve existing peptides or to design new ones for clinical applications. However, several considerations have to be taken into account to optimize the recognition properties of the targeting-peptide to its receptor, to improve its stability in the biological fluids and its residence in the body, or to increase its overall therapeutic effect. In this review, we highlight the different aspects which need to be considered for the development of an efficient peptide receptor-mediated radionuclide therapy in different neoplasms

κ-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu2(CN)3 spin liquid : beyond the average structure

We present here the first accurate determination of the exact structure of κ-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu2(CN)3. Not only did we show that the room temperature structure used over the last twenty years was incorrect, but we were also able to correctly and precisely determine it. The results of our work provide evidence that the structure presents a triclinic symmetry with two non-equivalent dimers in the unit cell, which implies a charge disproportionation between the dimers. However, structural refinement shows that the charge disproportionation is quite weak at room temperature