Facile and unified approach to skeletally diverse, privileged scaffolds

A novel strategy has been developed to generate a diverse array of privileged scaffolds from readily available tetrahydropyridine precursors that may be prepared by a multicomponent assembly process followed by a ring-closing metathesis. The functionality embedded in these key intermediates enables their facile elaboration into more complex structures of biological relevance by a variety of ring-forming processes and refunctionalizations.