Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 14, Issue 7, 2014

Regarding its many roles for lead optimization and drug development, fluorine will definitely continue to be of major importance in medicinal chemistry. With safe and selective fluorinating agents at hands, the use of fluorinated compounds has become routine in pharmaceutical and material sciences and many of the well-appreciated organofluorine inductive effects are now understood. In contrast, our knowledge of Read More

In recent years, several new fluorinated functional groups have been employed in medicinal chemistry. This review will highlight some recent developments in this area. We draw attention to useful synthetic advances for the installation of fluorine-containing groups. In addition, we examine the application of some fluorinated functional groups that have recently been gaining popularity in drug discovery. We use matched-pair Read More

Mechanism-based inhibitors are relatively chemically inert compounds that become activated when processed by their target enzyme, leading to covalent enzyme inactivation. Fluorine substitution confers a number of properties that are beneficial to the chemistry of such inhibitors and to their potential use as pharmaceuticals, and indeed several fluorinated mechanism-based inhibitors have made it to clinical usage over t Read More

Positron (β+) emission tomography (PET) is a powerful, noninvasive tool for the in vivo, three-dimensional imaging of physiological structures and biochemical pathways. The continued growth of PET imaging relies on a corresponding increase in access to radiopharmaceuticals (biologically active molecules labeled with short-lived radionuclides such as fluorine-18). This unique need to incorporate the short-lived fluorine-18 a Read More

All domains of society are impacted by fluorine chemistry. In particular, fluorine plays a key role in medicinal, pharmaceutical and agrochemical sciences in which the synthesis and evaluation of molecules featuring one or more fluorine atoms is nowadays routine in every new discovery and development program. Since the beginning of this century, enantiopure fluorinated molecules are at the forefront of innovation of the tr Read More

The ever-growing number of fluorinated compounds in medicinal and agrochemical applications has led to a remarkable positive emulation in research. The last few years have been the witness of several advances in the search of more effective and user-friendlier methods for the introduction of fluorine as substituent or of fluorinated groups on various structures. In particular, the synthesis of trifluoromethyl ethers Read More

This review is a follow-up to the previous chapter, “Monofluorinated Heterocycles” (Topics in Heterocyclic Chemistry, 2012, 33–63), and presents an overview of synthetic chemistry of heterocycles with only one trifluoromethyl group directly attached to the ring (trifluoromethylated heterocycles). Particular attention is given to the modern direct trifluoromethylation methods, including catalytic reactions, organometallic reagents, c Read More

Fluorinated organic compounds have a long history in medicinal chemistry, and synthetic methods to access target fluorinated compounds are undergoing a revolution. One powerful strategy for the installation of fluorinecontaining functional groups includes decarboxylative reactions. Benefits of decarboxylative approaches potentially include: 1) readily available substrates or reagents 2) mild reaction conditions; 3) sim Read More