Angew. Chem. Int. Edn doi:10.1002/anie.200802164 (2008)

Many drugs contain compounds with fluorine–carbon bonds, as do tracers used in positron-emission tomography (PET), a medical imaging technique. Producing these compounds is tricky and involves harsh conditions. Now, Tobias Ritter and his colleagues at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have worked out how to perform the fluorination reaction at room temperature.

They developed a palladium catalyst that can replace a boronic acid group on an aromatic ring with fluorine. The catalyst has nitrogen-containing ligands that make it resistant to attack from aggressive fluorination reagents. Other chemical groups on the ring do not interfere with the reaction, and the carbon–fluorine bond forms in the final step. That is important for making PET tracers because the fluorine isotopes used for PET have short half-lives.