Our studies were commenced with cinnamyl carbamoyl chloride
6a, made from corresponding cinnamyl amine. Extensive catalyst-ligand screening and condition optimization were carried out, and selected data were tabulated in
Table 1. It was found that premixing CuCl (5 mol%), Dppp (6 mol%) and
tBuOLi (2.0 equiv.) in diethyl ether forms a homogenous solution, subsequent introduction of B
2pin
2 (1.5 equiv.) and substrate
6a (1.0 equiv.) affords a slow reaction which fails to achieve full conversion even after 3 days. Pleasingly, 3-boryl-2-phenyl
γ-lactam
7a was collected in 73% yield as a single diastereomor (entry 1). The relative stereochemistry of the 2, 3-disubstituted lactam was determined as
cis-configuration by single crystal X-Ray crystallography (
Fig. 1).
tBuOK as the base gave a noticeable higher yield (79%) than
tBuOLi (73%) and
tBuONa (69%) did in the same conditions (entry 3
vs. entries 1 and 2). Examination of a diverse copper salts revealed that CuBr performed best as a pre-catalyst (entries 4–8). Doubling the catalyst/ligand loading resulted in a further enhancement in yield to 87% even in a much shorter reaction time of only 6 h (entry 9). Brief solvent screening showed that THF and dimethoxylethane (DME) are similarly good media for this reaction, giving better results than methyl
tert-butyl ether (MTBE) and toluene did (entries 10–13). However, at this stage, conditions capable to realize complete consumption of
6a for sure were not identified yet. Increasing the B
2pin
2/
tBuOK combination from equivalents of 1.5/2.0 to 2.0/2.5 in conjunction with elongating the reaction time to 24 h effected full conversion and pushed the yield up to 90% (entries 14 and 15). With the so far optimal conditions, we progressed to evaluate ligand impact on the reaction (entries 16–22). It was found that dppe and R-Binap are as excellent as dppp; dppb and dppf are also viable but with moderate yields; and dppm, Xantphos and JohnPhos are much inferior ligands for this copper catalyzed process. These data evidenced the important role of ligand (entries 16–22). Without copper salt, the reaction didnot take place at all, in support the metal catalytic pathway (entry 23). In the absence of a ligand,
7a was still obtained albeit in a lower yield (entry 24), a result not out of expectation in the mechanistic point of view.