From this century, great progresses have been made in the field of metal-based medicine and relevant fundamental researches. However, there are also major problems left to be solved. This review summarized the recent progresses and the bottlenecks of two important metal drugs, anti-cancer platinum/non-platinum drugs and anti-diabetic vanadium compounds. The following aspects are proposed for attentions in the future research: (1) Discover new molecular mechanism of metal drugs for rational design of metal drugs; (2) Control of metal toxicity based on molecular mechanism; (3) Rational metal drug design and metal drug delivery system based on nano materials, molecular complexes and drug transporters; (4) Synthetic biology of metal complexes.

Contents
1 Introduction
2 Anti-cancer compounds
2.1 Drug resistance of cisplatin
2.2 Rational drug design
2.3 Improve bioavailability through drug design and targeted delivery
2.4 Novel anti-cancer strategy: poisoning cell vs prisoning cell
3 Anti-diabetic vanadium compounds
3.1 Mechanisms of pharmacological actions and rational drug design
3.2 Toxicity of vanadium compounds
3.3 Pharmacokinetics of vanadium compounds
4 Conclusions and outlook