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The unnatural isotope fluorine-18 ((18)F) is used as a positron emitter in molecular imaging. Currently, many potentially useful (18)F-labeled probe molecules are inaccessible for imaging because no fluorination chemistry is available to make them. The 110-minute half-life of (18)F requires rapid syntheses for which (18)Ffluoride is the preferred source of fluorine because of its practical access and suitable isotope enrichment. However, conventional (18)Ffluoride chemistry has been limited to nucleophilic fluorination reactions. We report the development of a palladium-based electrophilic fluorination reagent derived from fluoride and its application to the synthesis of aromatic (18)F-labeled molecules via late-stage fluorination. Late-stage fluorination enables the synthesis of conventionally unavailable positron emission tomography (PET) tracers for anticipated applications in pharmaceutical development as well as preclinical and clinical PET imaging.
Lee et al. (Thu,) studied this question.