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Review
. 2018 Mar 10;23(3):628.
doi: 10.3390/molecules23030628.

Selenides and Diselenides: A Review of Their Anticancer and Chemopreventive Activity

Mónica Álvarez-Pérez  1 , Wesam Ali  2   3 , Małgorzata Anna Marć  4 , Jadwiga Handzlik  5 , Enrique Domínguez-Álvarez  6
Affiliations
Review

Selenides and Diselenides: A Review of Their Anticancer and Chemopreventive Activity

Mónica Álvarez-Pérez et al. Molecules. .

Abstract

Selenium and selenocompounds have attracted the attention and the efforts of scientists worldwide due to their promising potential applications in cancer prevention and/or treatment. Different organic selenocompounds, with diverse functional groups that contain selenium, have been reported to exhibit anticancer and/or chemopreventive activity. Among them, selenocyanates, selenoureas, selenoesters, selenium-containing heterocycles, selenium nanoparticles, selenides and diselenides have been considered in the search for efficiency in prevention and treatment of cancer and other related diseases. In this review, we focus our attention on the potential applications of selenides and diselenides in cancer prevention and treatment that have been reported so far. The around 80 selenides and diselenides selected herein as representative compounds include promising antioxidant, prooxidant, redox-modulating, chemopreventive, anticancer, cytotoxic and radioprotective compounds, among other activities. The aim of this work is to highlight the possibilities that these novel organic selenocompounds can offer in an effort to contribute to inspire medicinal chemists in their search of new promising derivatives.

Keywords: anticancer compounds; antioxidants; chemoprevention; cytostaticity; cytotoxicity; diselenides; selenides; selenium; selenocompounds.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Naturally occurring selenides (a) and diselenides (b).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Synthetic diselenides and related selenides or selenols with antioxidant and/or prooxidant studies [44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68].
Figure 3
Figure 3
Synthetic diselenides and related selenols with kinase modulation properties [73,74,75,76].
Figure 4
Figure 4
Synthetic diselenides with antiproliferative studies [52,56,66,67,76,77,78,79].
Figure 5
Figure 5
Synthetic diselenides with apoptotic activity [80,81,82].
Figure 6
Figure 6
Synthetic selenides with antioxidant studies [83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92].
Figure 7
Figure 7
Synthetic selenides with antitumoral studies [91,92,93,94,95].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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