A General and Scalable Method toward Enantioenriched C2-Substituted Azetidines Using Chiral tert-Butanesulfinamides

Diverse ranges of chiral nitrogen-containing heterocycles serve as a molecular toolbox for modulating a wide array of biological processes, but enantioenriched production of smaller chiral heterocycles is a bottleneck. There is a lack of general approaches for the stereoselective preparation of chiral 4-membered monocyclic C2-substituted azetidines, where many routes to different substitution types are possible, but no simple and common approach exists. To bridge this gap, inexpensive and widely available chiral tert-butanesulfinamides are harnessed for chiral induction with 1,3-bis-electrophilic 3-chloropropanal, providing a three-step approach to C2-substituted azetidines with aryl, vinyl, allyl, branched alkyl, and linear alkyl substituents. Eleven azetidine products are produced, and the approach is shown to be effective on a gram-scale with a single purification of the protected azetidine product in 44% yield over three steps in an 85:15 diastereomeric ratio. In most cases, the diastereomers are separable using normal phase chromatography, often resulting in previously elusive enantiopure azetidine products. Protected azetidines were shown to undergo rapid and efficient sulfinamide cleavage, producing an azetidine hydrochloride salt that was subjected to derivatization reactions, highlighting the method's applicability to medicinal chemistry approaches.