Cited research: Science 328, 1679–1681 (2010)

Chemists would like to attach trifluoromethyl groups to organic molecules to improve their pharmacological properties, such as fat solubility or metabolic stability, but have struggled to find a simple way to add them to compounds containing aromatic rings.

Now Stephen Buchwald at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his colleagues have used a palladium catalyst to attach these groups to benzene-based aryl chloride molecules, under mild conditions.

Their method avoids the harsh conditions needed in previous methods and should allow the addition of trifluoromethyl groups to drugs at late stages in synthesis. D.P.C.