A General Strategy for N-(Hetero)arylpiperidine Synthesis Using Zincke Imine Intermediates.

Methods to synthesize diverse collections of substituted piperidines are valuable due to the prevalence of this heterocycle in pharmaceutical compounds. Here, we present a general strategy to access -(hetero)arylpiperidines using a pyridine ring-opening and ring-closing approach via Zincke imine intermediates. This process generates pyridinium salts from a wide variety of substituted pyridines and (heteroaryl)anilines; hydrogenation reactions and nucleophilic additions then access the -(hetero)arylpiperidine derivatives.