NaIO4/Br- as a mild system for the oxidation of 1-methyl-anthra-9,10-quinones
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Drugs and Devices, Oncology
- Keywords
- anthraquinone-1-carboxylic acids, periodate/brominating reagent system, anticancer activity
- Copyright
- © 2015 Cybulski et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. NaIO4/Br- as a mild system for the oxidation of 1-methyl-anthra-9,10-quinones. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1505v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1505v1
Abstract
One of the anthraquinone classes comprises compounds with a carbonyl group. These natural or synthetic anthraquinones find their application as building blocks in the synthesis of the compounds with a biological activity. Recently, 4-substituted anthra-9,10-quinone-1-carboxylic acids (2) have been used as key intermediates in the synthesis of patented compounds (3) with anticancer activity against multidrug resistant cell lines. Although 2,7-dihydro-3H-dibenz[de,h]cinnolin-3,7-diones (3) were successfully synthetized in a small laboratory scale, several problems were observed during the preparation of their acid intermediates (2) in a multi-gram scale. The known methods for the preparation of 2 are based on the oxidation of the methyl group in anthra-9,10-quinones (1). The most common are: the oxidation with the diluted nitric acid under high pressure in a sealed tube at the temperature of 195-220 oC, the oxidation in nitrobenzene by passing chlorine gas through the reaction mixture at the temperature of 160-170 oC or in a presence of the fuming sulphuric acid. The mentioned methods require aggressive reagents and specific reaction conditions including high pressure and temperature. Thus, there was a need to find a new efficient, cost-effective and reproducible synthetic method of preparation of 2. While searching literature it was found that the direct oxidation of alkylarenes mediated by the sodium periodate/lithium bromide combination produces benzyl acetates throughout benzyl bromides in the acetic acid, or benzylic acids in the diluted inorganic acid. Based on these results we examined a variety of reaction conditions with or without the bromine source and the oxidizing anion. As a result, a novel procedure for the preparation of highly pure 4-substituted anthra-9,10-quinone-1-carboxylic acids (HPLC > 99.5%) using oxidizing anion/ brominating reagent system was developed. It enabled 2 isolation by the simple filtration of the reaction mixture and was applied in the scale-up of 2,7-dihydro-3H-dibenz[de,h]cinnolin-3,7-dione derivatives.
Author Comment
This is an Abstract submitted to the X MKNOL Conference.