Metal chelators have been largely used since the fifties of last century in the therapy of acute and chronic metalintoxication. In recent years their use has been extended to the treatment of social relevant diseases as cancer,diabetes, and neurodegeneration. This increase of new indications for chelating agents contrasts with the inadequacyof number and kind of existing drugs: the availability of a variety of chelators for a given toxic metal iongives to the clinicians the possibility of properly modulating the therapy according to the problems of the patientas well as to the severity of intoxication. Till nowadays the considerable effort of the scientific community has insome instance given limited and poor results. This failure can be ascribed to difficulties inherent to the biological,chemical and clinical restraints, and above all to two main causes: the low incidence of some kind of intoxicationsprevents expensive researches by pharma-industries, and the scarce interaction between chemical and biomedicalresearchers leads to a wasting of efforts and resources. The present trend of sharing different expertises will leadto achieve the target of ameliorating the pertinent treatment for any metal intoxication.
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