Elghareeb E. Elboray

Carbophilic 3-component cascades: access to complex bioactive cyclopropyl diindolylmethanes.

Naturally occurring indole-3-carbinol and 3,3-diindolylmethane show bioactivity in a number of disparate disease areas, including cancer, prompting substantial synthetic analogue activity. We describe a new approach to highly functionalised derivatives that starts from allene gas and proceeds via the combination of a three-component Pd(0)-catalysed cascade with a one-pot, three-component carbophilic Pt(II) cascade linked to a stereoselective acid-catalysed Mannich-Michael reaction that generates complex cyclopropyl diindolylmethanes which show selective activity against prostate cancer cell lines.

New aspects of the formation of 2-substituted thiazolidine-4-carboxylic acids and their thiohydantoin derivatives

Aromatic aldehydes reacted readily with (R)-cysteine in boiling acidified methanol to give diastereomeric mixtures of the corresponding 2-(aryl substituted) thiazolidine-4-carboxylic acids. 4-Nitrobenzaldehyde under similar conditions afforded one isomer of 2-(4-nitrophenyl)thiazolidine-4-carboxylic acid, which epimerized in the NMR solvents into a diastereomeric mixture. 2-Nitrobenzaldehyde reacted with (R)-cysteine to afford 3,5-bis-(2-nitrophenyl)tetrahydro-1H-thiazolo[3,4-c]oxazol-1-one as the sole product, which collapsed in the NMR solvent into a diastereomeric mixture of the thiazolidine-4-carboxylic acids. The thiazolidine derivatives reacted smoothly with phenyl isothiocyanate to give single isomers of the corresponding thiohydantoins.