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Proton Donor Acidity Controls Selectivity in Nonaromatic Nitrogen Heterocycle Synthesis

Acid-Derived Diversity Compounds with nitrogen-bearing rings have proven rather promising in pharmaceutical research, spurring the need for improved synthetic methods to access structurally diverse variants of this motif. Duttwyler et al. (p. 678) show that applying acids of different strengths to a dihydropyridine intermediate leads to selective protonation at either of two sites, depending on whether the reaction proceeds under kinetic or thermodynamic (that is, equilibrated) control. The protonations in turn activate the rings for addition of various carbon nucleophiles to the periphery, thereby affording multiple different substitution patterns for use in screening studies. Acids of different strengths propel a common intermediate to a diverse array of compounds sought in pharmaceutical research. Piperidines are prevalent in natural products and pharmaceutical agents and are important synthetic targets for drug discovery and development. We report on a methodology that provides highly substituted piperidine derivatives with regiochemistry selectively tunable by varying the strength of acid used in the reaction. Readily available starting materials are first converted to dihydropyridines via a cascade reaction initiated by rhodium-catalyzed carbon-hydrogen bond activation. Subsequent divergent regio- and diastereoselective protonation of the dihydropyridines under either kinetic or thermodynamic control provides two distinct iminium ion intermediates that then undergo highly diastereoselective nucleophilic additions. X-ray structural characterization of both the kinetically and thermodynamically favored iminium ions along with density functional theory calculations provide a theoretical underpinning for the high selectivities achieved for the reaction sequences.