1 there has been a renewed focus on studying the metabolites of clinical candidates during the drug development process throughout the pharmaceutical industry.2 While the FDA MIST guidelines recommend that certain metabolites be subjected to additional safety studies, metabolites of clinical candidates are also needed for pharmacokinetic and pharmacological studies. In fact, there are examples where a metabolite, after being profiled further, replaced the parent compound as the drug candidate.3,4 Therefore, the development of synthetic routes to supply sufficient amounts of metabolites for their complete characterization has become an important objective for many drug discovery and development programs.Recently, we reported on the discovery of AMG 221 (1), an inhibitor of 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1 (11β-HSD1) that has entered clinical trials for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. 5,6 During our development efforts, we discovered that 1 was metabolized into eight common oxidation products among rat, mice, dog, monkey, and human (2À9) (Chart 1). The norbornyl and isopropyl groups of 1 underwent metabolic oxidation to give hydroxylation products 2, 3, 5À8, ketone 4, and alkene 9. For structure elucidation (see the Supporting Information for more details), these metabolites were isolated from in vitro dog/human liver microsomal incubations supplemented with NADPH or isolated from rat urine obtained following a single dose administration of AMG 221 (1). However, the bioactivity and pharmacokinetics of these metabolites could not be determined with the small amount of material generated from microsomes. Therefore, we set out to prepare these metabolites by synthetic methods so that we might more fully characterize these compounds and further confirm their structures.Turning first to the synthesis of the metabolites formed on the norbornyl ring (2À5), we devised a route (Scheme 1) that allowed us to prepare three of these from a common intermediate 16. We envisioned using chiral norbornyl diol 10, 7 as an intermediate for the preparation of analogs 2À4. Preparation of norbornyl diol 10 by Hiyashi's method 7 followed by monobenzylation delivered compound 11. Compound 11 was treated with tert-butylchlorodiphenylsilane in DMF to give compound 12, which was then debenzylated by hydrogenation to give compound 13. The chirality of the hydroxyl group was inverted through a two step sequence by oxidation to the ketone, followed by reduction with L-selectride to give compound 14. A Mitsunobu reaction with phthalimide followed by deprotection with hydrazine gave a primary amine.8 Addition of benzoyl isothiocyanate to the amine followed by hydrolysis produced thiourea 15. Heating thiourea 15 with ethyl 2-bromo-isovalerate in a microwave reactor delivered 5-isopropylthiazolone. Alkylation at the 5-position of the thiazolone was achieved with LDA and methyl iodide, and after removal of the TBDPS protecting group, the desired thiazolone 16 was obtained as a mixture of two diastereomers. The metabolite 2 was obtained thro...