The above preliminary experiments established that a phenyl spacer can improve the stability of NInC hybrids (Scheme 6), as a result, and in the face of 3-fluoro-4-formylphenyl boronic acid being commercially available, the palladium catalysed coupling of 30 (ESI S36 †) to 3-fluoro-4-formylphenyl boronic acid was attempted: hardly surprisingly, 31 was accomplished in moderate yields (Scheme 8) after flash column chromatography purification.