No abstract

The unique features the trifluoromethyl group imparts to pharmaceuticals, crop-protection agents, and functional materials emphasize the necessity to design and develop new reagents and methods for the direct trifluoromethylation of a wide range of organic substrates. Electrophilic trifluoromethylation, that is, the reaction of a suitable reagent capable of formally transferring an intact CF 3 + unit, has been shown to be one of these methods.[1] However, despite the availability of several such effective reagents, the electrophilic trifluoromethylation of hard nucleophiles, for example, oxygen-or nitrogen-centered ones, remains challenging. In particular, the formation of a N À CF 3 bond by such a reaction is still extremely rare. In fact, the NCF 3 unit is usually constructed by the interconversion of suitable functional groups. Thus, fluorination of N-formylamines, [2] thiuram sulfides, [3] isocyanates, [4] and trichloromethylamines, [5] the reaction of secondary amines with CBr 2 F 2 and tetrakis(dimethylamino)ethylene, [6] and the electrochemical fluorination of alkylamines [7] constitute the still relatively modest set of methods. Of these, the most frequently used approach is the oxidative desulfurization-fluorination of dithiocarbamates first described for the generation of NCF 3 groups by Hiyama and Kuroboshi.[8]The single, still very recent report of a direct trifluoromethylation at nitrogen is due to Umemoto and co-workers.[9] They describe the direct N-trifluoromethylation of amines, anilines, and pyridines under very mild conditions achieved with in situ generated and thermally unstable O-(trifluoromethyl)dibenzofuranium salts (corresponding reactions of alcohols and phenols are also known). However, this type of reagent suffers from several shortcomings. The active CF 3 source is obtained by photochemical decomposition of diazonium salts at very low temperature, and the synthesis requires several steps including the construction of a CF 3 O-aryl moiety. It is therefore likely that this methodology will not replace the corresponding functional-group interconversions in the near future.We have shown that a new generation of readily accessible trifluoromethylation reagents based on hypervalent iodine, such as compounds 1 and 2 (Scheme 1), display the desired reactivity towards a number of C-, S-, P-, and O-centered nucleophiles. Despite their purported soft nature, reagents 1 and 2 do trifluoromethylate alcohols and sulfonic acids upon activation with Lewis [10] and Brønsted acids, [11] respectively, thus significantly expanding their application range.During a recent investigation of the direct electrophilic trifluoromethylation of heteroarenes [12] using reagent 1 and catalytic amounts of bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide (HNTf 2 ) in acetonitrile, we surprisingly found that benzotriazole (3) is converted to the corresponding N-substituted N-trifluoroimidoyl derivative 4, as shown in Scheme 2. The generation of compound 4 corresponds to a novel Rittertype [13] reaction during which a new NÀCF 3 bond...

Fluorine-containing drugs have played a major role over the past decade and currently make up 20 % of all pharmaceuticals and 30 % of all agrochemicals on the world market.

No abstract

Multitasking: A new preparative route to fluorine‐containing compounds combines the advantages of solid‐phase synthesis with the incorporation of fluorine at the end of the synthetic route. A sulfur linker enables simultaneous fluorination of the target structures in the cleavage step. As it is stable under different reaction conditions, the linker has potential in the combinatorial synthesis of fluorinated drug structures.