Ligand-Based Fluorine NMR Screening: Principles and Applications in Drug Discovery Projects.

Ligand-based fluorine NMR screening has gained popularity in drug discovery projects during the past decade and has become a powerful methodology to produce high quality hits. Its high sensitivity to protein binding makes it particularly suitable for fragment screening, allowing detection and binding strength measurement of very weak affinity ligands. The screening can be performed in direct or competition format, and its versatility allows application to complex biological and chemical systems. As the potential of the methodology has now been recognized and successfully demonstrated in several relevant medicinal chemistry projects, it is now an appropriate time to report the learned lessons and point the way to the future. In this Perspective the principles of the methodology along with several applications to pharmaceutical projects are presented.