Iron-mediated modular decarboxylative cross-nucleophile coupling

Summary

Carboxylic acids are valuable building blocks for pharmaceutical discovery because of their chemical stability, commercial availability, and structural diversity. Decarboxylative coupling reactions enable versatile functionalization of these feedstock chemicals, but many of the most general methods require prefunctionalization of carboxylic acids with redox-active moieties. These internal oxidants can be costly, their installation impedes rapid library synthesis, and their use results in environmentally problematic organic byproducts. We report herein a method for the direct decarboxylative cross-coupling of native carboxylic acids with nucleophilic coupling partners mediated by inexpensive, terrestrially abundant, and non-toxic Fe(III) salts. This method involves an initial photochemical decarboxylation followed by radical-polar crossover, which enables the construction of diverse carbon–carbon, carbon–oxygen, and carbon–nitrogen bonds with remarkable generality.