A Hybrid Machine-Learning Approach to Predict the Site Selectivity of Iridium-Catalyzed Arene Borylation

The borylation of aryl and heteroaryl C–H bonds is valuable for the site-selective functionalization of C–H bonds in complex molecules. Iridium catalysts ligated by bipyridine ligands catalyze the borylation of the aryl C–H bonds that are most acidic and least sterically hindered, but predicting the site of borylation in molecules containing multiple arenes is difficult. To address this challenge, we report a hybrid computational model that predicts the Site of Borylation (SoBo) in complex molecules. The SoBo model combines density functional theory, semi-empirical quantum mechanics, cheminformatics, linear regression, and machine learning to predict site selectivity and to extrapolate these predictions to new chemical space. Experimental validation of SoBo showed that the model predicts the major site of borylation of pharmaceutical intermediates with higher accuracy than prior machine-learning models or human experts, demonstrating that SoBo will be useful to guide experiments for the borylation of specific C(sp2)–H bonds during pharmaceutical development.