Monoacylated symmetrical secondary diamines are building blocks 1 or intermediates 2 widely used in the drug discovery process that are present in several investigational and established drugs. 3 Examples include the cardiotonic agent vesnarinone and the antihypertensive agent prazosin (Chart 1). Direct monoacylation of symmetrical diamines is frequently fraught with the complication associated with the tendency for bis-acylation to occur. To date, there are a number of indirect, multistep preparations of monoacylated symmetric secondary diamines from diamines 4,5 with the most common pathway involving the selective monoprotection of one nitrogen atom, followed by acylation of the remaining nitrogen and finally deprotection, to afford the desired product. 5 There have been few reports of the direct transformation of diamines to mono benzoyl diamines, 6-9 the main difficulty with this simple transformation being the formation of dibenzoyl diamines. 6 Under normal basic conditions using, for example, pyridine as the base and solvent, the dibenzoylated compound 4a was the dominant product, even through a large excess (10 equiv) of piperazine 1a was used (Scheme 1). A possible explanation of the uncontrollable dibenzoylation of symmetrical secondary diamines under these conditions is that the monobenzoylated intermediate 3a is more soluble in the solvent than piperazine 1a and reacts preferentially with the benzoyl chloride to provide predominantly the observed dibenzoylated product 4a.This problem has been resolved to some degree by application of a rather laborious procedure involving the multistep addition of starting materials with very cautious control of the pH (range 3.8-5.4) of the reaction mixture. 5,6 Similarly, Watthey and co-workers described the direct monoaroylation of piperazine and homopiperazine in moderate yields (46-60%) using AcOH as the solvent. 7 In this case, the authors took advantage of the fact that piperazine was mostly present as a monoacetate salt and the product remained in that form after the benzoylation. Alternative procedures have utilized benzoic acid 8 and benzoic esters 9 as coupling partners.After encountering several of these problems in the preparation of monobenzoylated piperazine derivatives, we sought a more reliable and predictable procedure that would be of general applicability. The criteria established for this new methodology were: (a) simple and readily available starting materials; (b) mild, preferably room temperature conditions; (c) the formation of the product cleanly in high yield.It was rationalized that the reactivity of the diamine could be altered by making the mono or disalt 5 of diamine 1, which should be more reactive toward an aroyl chloride than diamine 1 itself, thus affording the monoacylated product 3a under kinetical control (Scheme 2). In developing this strategy, several experimental protocols were explored: 1 (a) 1 equiv of BuLi, (b) 1 equiv of BzCl; 10 2 (a) 1 equiv of BuLi, (b) 1 equiv of TMSCl, (c) 1 equiv of BzCl; 11 3 (a) 2 equiv of BuLi, (b) ...