The dash (or hyphen) has no special meaning in general regular expressions (except in character classes). So there is absolutely no problem with:

if ($text =~ /Screening Ligands by X-ray Crystallography/) {
     say "MATCH!";
} else {
     say "NOPE!";
}
[download]

Please note that the code you showed has an extra closing curly brace.

I also agree with Anonymous Monk that a regex might not be the ideal solution for your problem. The index built-in is likely to work faster, and the use of a hash might also be considered, but we don't know enough about what you are trying to do to be able to help you more precisely.