Ir-Catalyzed Chemodivergent Allenylic Alkylation of Vinyl Az-ides: Highly Enantioselective Synthesis of α-Allenylic Amides and Ketones

Enantioselective allenylic alkylation reactions of unstabilized enolates have never been reported. We now present a unified fragment-coupling strategy for the first enantioselective synthesis of α-allenylic amides and ketones through allenyl-ic alkylation of vinyl azides. In these chemodivergent reactions, cooperatively catalyzed by Ir(I)/(phosphoramidite,olefin) complex and Sc(OTf)3, vinyl azides act as the surrogate for both amide enolates and ketone enolates. The desiccant (molecular sieves) plays a crucial role in controlling the chemodivergency of this enantioconvergent and regioselective reaction: Under otherwise identical reaction conditions, the presence of the desiccant led to α-allenylic amides while its absence resulted in α-allenylic ketones from the same substrate combinations. Utilizing race-mic allenylic alcohols as the alkylating agent, the overall process represents a dynamic kinetic asymmetric transformation (DyKAT), where both α-allenylic amides and ketones are formed with the same absolute configuration generally with outstanding enantioselectivity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of the use of vinyl azide as the ketone enolate surrogate in an enantioselective transformation.