“…Accordingly, we shifted our focus to a phosphinamide-based palladacycle catalyst 16, which was developed previously by our group (Du et al., 2015, Guan et al., 2014). A supportive clue, albeit not tightly related with the proposed Heck-type reaction, that encouraged us to inspect this catalyst herein is that 16 exhibited extremely high catalytic activity for mild Suzuki coupling of a broad range of arene ( pseudo )halides (Wu et al., 2015, Wu et al., 2018, Cao et al., 2018). To our delight, the use of 16 as catalyst did improve substantially the yield of 15a to 72% (entry 4).…”