An expedient route for the generation of substituted thieno[3,2-e][1,4]diazepine-2,5-dione analogues is described herein. It was demonstrated in solution that thiaisatoic anhydride and its N-alkylated equivalents react in opposite ways with amino acids in basic conditions. This versatile reactivity was used to develop an efficient strategy on solid support. Wang resin-bound thiaisatoic anhydride was coupled with N-alkylated a-amino acids, cyclocondensed and effectively cleaved from the polymer to provide a preliminary collection of thieno[3,2-e][1,4]diazepine-2,5-diones in 83-99% purity and 71-95% yield.The well-known diazepine-containing cholecystekinin (CCK) receptor antagonists (L364,718 and L365,260) were recently reported by our group to also inhibit the p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) activity with a possible interaction with its ATP binding site as demonstrated in dynamic docking studies. 1 The p38 MAP kinase has emerged as an attractive target for chemotherapy of rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory disorders, with several inhibitors currently undergoing clinical trials. 2-5 Therefore, part of our efforts is today directed towards the design of selective p38 MAPK heterocyclicfused diazepine-based inhibitors. The diazepine scaffold is one of the classical examples of privileged structures which has proved its effectiveness in a number of pharmaceutical drugs and still continues to attract much interest today in medicinal chemistry. [6][7][8][9][10][11][12] In this context, the synthesis of combinatorial focused libraries is a valuable tool to explore structure-activity relationships and the main key for the success of such an approach is the use of parallel solid-phase organic synthesis. In this paper we report an expedient solid-supported synthesis of substituted thienodiazepinediones employing an N-polymer-bound thiaisatoic anhydride as starting material.Since isatoic anhydrides 13 are versatile intermediates in medicinal and organic chemistry, 14-17 we recently reported regioselective ring opening of the isatoic anhydride isoster 1 by nucleophilic attack of a-amino acids to provide two libraries of optically pure thienylimidazolidinediones 18 and thienodiazepinediones. 19 In our previous studies, we demonstrated that 1H-thieno[3,2-d] [1,3]oxazine-2,4-dione (1) reacts in an opposite way to isatoic anhydride when treated by a-amino acids (a-aa) in basic protic or aprotic conditions to afford ureidodiacid (3) by oxazine ring opening at the carbamic carbonyl (route B, Scheme 1). 18 Surprisingly, the selectivity of this nucleophilic attack can be satisfyingly reversed in favor of the carboxylic carbonyl to restore an isatoic anhydridelike reactivity in neutral protic conditions (amide 4, route A, Scheme 1). 19 This unexpected result demonstrated that the basicity of the medium and the nature of the solvent have a great importance in the course of the reaction. Supported by a kinetic study of the reactions of amines with isatoic anhydride, 20 we hypothesized the existence of an isocyanate...