Paper highlighted on the Front Cover of Molecules, Volume 25, Issue 24 (December-2 2020): Cover Story “Zinc Complexes with Nitrogen Donor Ligands as Anticancer Agents” Molecules, 25 (2020) 5814.

Cover Story: Zinc, the second most abundant trace element in the human body, is one of the most important micro-elements essential for human physiology and the impairment of its homeostasis can lead to various diseases and can also be related to cancer development. Its ubiquity in thousands of proteins and enzymes is related to its chemical features, its lack of redox activity, and its ability to support different coordination geometries and to promote fast ligand exchange. Zinc compounds can have beneficial therapeutic and preventive effects on infectious diseases generally exerting lower toxicity and determining few side effects. Among the great number of zinc derivatives that have been proposed as antitumor agents so far, this review focuses on recent zinc complexes comprising N-donor ligands.