Anomalous ¹H NMR chemical shift behavior of substituted benzoic acid esters

Benzoic acid esters represent key building blocks for many drug discovery and development programs and have been advanced as potent PDE4 inhibitors for inhaled administration for treatment of respiratory diseases. This class of compounds has also been employed in myriad industrial processes and as common food preservatives. Recent work directed toward the synthesis of intermediates for a proprietary medicinal chemistry program led us to observe that the H-1 NMR chemical shifts of substituents ortho to the benzoic acid ester moiety defied conventional iterative chemical shift prediction protocols. To explore these unexpected results, we initiated a detailed computational study employing density functional theory (DFT) calculations to better understand the unexpectedly large variance in expected versus experimental NMR chemical shifts.