Polyoxometalates (POMs) are a large family of metal-oxygen clusters of the early transition metals in high oxidation states, most commonly V V , Mo VI , and W VI . [1,2] Their diversity in structure and composition allows a wide versatility in terms of shape, polarity, redox potentials, surface charge distribution, and acidity. The last twenty years have witnessed a growing interest in the biological properties of POMs and their potential applications in medicine.[3] POMs exhibit antiviralnotably anti HIV [4,5] -as well as antitumor [6,7] and antibiotic [8,9] activities. Nonetheless, progress along these lines has been quite slow because of the low physiological stability of most POMs. Only a few POMs were reported with enhanced hydrolytic stability. [4,10,11] An original approach is the encapsulation of POMs in starch nanoparticles. [6] The introduction of organic groups into the POM framework could greatly increase the number of compounds available for screening, together with a potential modulation of essential features, such as stability, bioavailability, and recognition.[3] While there is a significant amount of work on hybrid POMs, [12][13][14] there have been only scattered reports of the reactivity of the side chain of such functionalized POMs. [15][16][17] Many of these organically derivatized POMs are unstable in water. Starting from hydrolytically more stable cyclopentadienyltitanium substituted POMs, [11,18] Keana reported the preparation and reactivity of derivatives with various functional groups. [19][20][21] We decided to reexamine the heteropolytungstates [a 2 -P 2 W 17 O 61 (SnR)] 7À reported by Pope and co-workers, [22,23] with an alkyltin group in place of the more fragile CpTi-moiety. These heteropolytungstate compounds have promising antitumor activities, [24] but the organic groups that were introduced were very simple and did not allow further functionalization. [18,22,24] It is important to have access to a wide variety of organic groups on the POM to meet specific requirements in biological applications. Different groups will enable the POM, for instance, to cross a membrane or to reach a specific receptor depending on their precise nature. We report herein our first findings on a flexible synthetic approach.To . [22,24] This strategy suffers from the incompatibility of the trichlorotin moiety with most organic functions, and the scarce versatility it allows. To prepare a functionalized POM useful as a scaffold for many applications, we decided to graft a pendant carboxylic acid onto a POM (Scheme 1), because it would allow peptide or ester coupling reactions, which are compatible with most bioactive compounds.The treatment of a buffered aqueous solution of K 10 [a 2 -P 2 W 17 O 61 ] 2 [25] with Cl 3 Sn(CH 2 ) 2 CO 2 H 7[26] yielded a new anion which was precipitated by the addition of nBu 4 NBr. The IR spectrum shows the vibrational bands arising from the Wells-Dawson structure without the typical splitting of the PÀO stretching vibration in the lacunary compound, [27] thus indicating t...