Introduction

The precious metal platinum also plays an important role in medicine. For more than 30 years, the active agents cisplatin (Abb. 1) , carboplatin (Abb. 2) and oxaliplatin (Abb. 3) have been used successfully as pharmaceuticals on more than half of all cancer patients. Today, a total of considerably more than 1 tonnes platinum per year is processed worldwide to pharmaceutical products for cancer therapy. In 2009 Sanofi-Aventis achieved sales of 957 mio. euro¹⁾ with the oxaliplatin preparation "Eloxatin".