Over the last few years, great emphasis has been given to develop ruthenium complexes to act as target specified chemotherapeutic agents. Indeed, there are few reviews available already, which summarized the literature based on cancer targeting ruthenium complexes before 2019. In this review, we summarized the research published from 2019, which is significant in numbers, focusing target specificity of organometallic ruthenium complexes towards various organelles (mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum, nucleus, microtubules, lysosome, golgi complex, etc), biomolecules including genetic material such as DNA, intracellular proteins, and various key enzymes (GSH, NADH, etc), which are upregulated in cancerous cells and provide a specific mechanistic pathway for cancer cell death. Moreover, structure activity relationship, technologies used for in vitro/in vivo imaging and involvement of nanocarriers towards cancer specific recognition have been discussed in short to expand the horizon of metal-based anticancer research. Herein, this review will give a broad idea to the readers about the selection of ruthenium complexes for approaching targeted chemotherapy.

在过去的几年里，人们非常重视开发钌配合物作为靶向特定的化学治疗剂。事实上，已经很少有综述可以总结2019年之前基于癌症靶向钌配合物的文献。在这篇综述中，我们总结了2019年发表的研究，该研究数量众多，重点关注有机金属钌配合物对各种细胞器的靶向特异性（线粒体、内质网、细胞核、微管、溶酶体、高尔基复合体等），生物分子包括DNA等遗传物质、细胞内蛋白质和各种关键酶（GSH、NADH等）)，它们在癌细胞中上调并为癌细胞死亡提供特定的机制途径。此外，结构活性关系、用于体外/体内成像的技术以及纳米载体对癌症特异性识别的参与已经被简要讨论，以扩大基于金属的抗癌研究的视野。在此，这篇综述将为读者提供关于选择用于接近靶向化疗的钌配合物的广泛想法。