Under the optimized conditions, the scope of reduction of carboxylic acids to alcohols was explored. As summarized in scheme 7, a wide range of functionality can be tolerated under these conditions. Aliphatic substrates with a reducible moiety like an alkene, alkyne, thioether etc (entries 34, 23, 42) gave good results without reducing the sensitive functionality. For aryl acetic acid and aryl propionic acid derivatives, the electronic nature and position of the ring substituents could be varied widely, and products 27, 28 and 29 were all obtained in high yields. Aromatic Scheme 6. Reduction of carboxylic acids to alcohols. carboxylic acids containing heterocycles like thiophene, benzofuran, indazole, pyridine, benzodioxole etc., (entries 30,32, 33, 35, 37, 38) were well tolerated. Electron withdrawing groups like nitrile, nitro, ester, and p-tolyl sulfonyl group on the aromatic ring seemed to perform better (entries 26, 24, 36, 40) as compared to the previous case wherein there was no reaction with moieties containing electron-withdrawing groups. It is interesting to note that the reduction of the intermediate thioester to the corresponding alcohol achieves full conversion by TLC and crude NMR. However, the slightly lower yields of some substrates can be attributed to the first step, i.e., the formation of the thioester from the carboxylic acid. To test the generality of this method, we went on to screen some late stage functionalized substrates and bioactive molecules (scheme 8). The reduction of biologically active aryl propionic acids used as non-steroidal antiinflammatory drugs naproxen and ibuprofen (entry 46, 47) proceeded very smoothly. Probenecid, a drug used to treat gouty arthritis and Repaglinide, a drug used to treat diabetes were reduced with excellent yields (entry 43, 51 respectively). Lastly, the fibrates, which are a class of lipid-lowering drugs, gemfibrozil (44), ciprofibrate (45), and bezafibrate (46) were all reduced to the corresponding alcohol in excellent yields. It is interesting to note that the gem-dichloro cyclopropane moiety in ciprofibrate remains intact under our reducing conditions. To test the limit of this reaction, we also tried to reduce some Merck informer library compounds, which gave the corresponding alcohol in good yields (entries 49, 50).