Highly Chemoselective Transamidation of Unactivated Tertiary Amides by Electrophilic N-C(O) Activation by Amide-to-Acyl Iodide Re-routing

The challenging transamidation of unactivated tertiary amides has been accomplished via cooperative acid/iodide catalysis. Most crucially, the method provides a novel manifold to re-route the reactivity of unactivated N,N-dialkyl amides through reactive acyl iodide intermediates, thus reverting the classical order of reactivity of carboxylic acid derivatives. This method provides a direct route to amide-to-amide bond interconversion with excellent chemoselectivity using equivalent amounts of amines. The combination of acid and iodide has been identified as the essential factor to activate the amide C-N bond through electrophilic catalytic activation, enabling the production of new desired transamidated products with wide substrate scope of both unactivated amides and amines, including late-stage functionalization of complex APIs (>80 examples). We anticipate that this powerful activation mode of unactivated amide bonds will find broad-ranging applications in chemical synthesis.