-: My name is Justin Geysler
and I work as a chemist at Eli Lilly.
What I do is I first synthesize the molecules
that we want to test as new drugs.
So there are people who dedicate their time
to designing molecules that they believe will serve
a certain function in the body.
And they design those and give those to me.
And from there, I take those molecules
and try to find out how to construct them
in the laboratory, sortof, essentially doing construction
on the smallest scale ever, right.
I'm putting together molecules in a way
that's novel and has never been done before.
So by running reactions, I work in a laboratory
and so I am running different reactions
and isolating the products and then, taking that forward
through multiple steps in order
to create these novel medicines.
Sometimes you use heat or sometimes we have to actually run
reactions at a very low temperature and we use ice.
But often, we have different reagents
that manipulate our molecules in certain ways.
And our molecules have different functional groups
and chemists will know this.
The different functional groups have different reactivities
in different settings so by taking my molecule
into a certain setting, then I can manipulate one
of the functional groups and hopefully,
in a desire to get my final products.
And one of the coolest things about my job
is probably the analytical technologies that we use
to look at the molecules because they're so small
that you can't see them with a microscope
or by any other means so we use things
like mass spectrometry and NMR
to look at these molecules in a way that,
it's not like looking through a microscope,
but instead, we get these signals that we read out
to identify our products.
So I work in discovery chemistry
and essentially, we're in the very beginning
of the drug design process
so somebody comes up with a hypothesis
that if we inhibit this protein,
for example, that it will illicit this response in the body
to treat a disease or something else, right?
And so, with that hypothesis then we try
to make those molecules and we try to inhibit the protein
and see what it does, so it's the very beginning.
Once we finish our process, which takes a few years
to complete, then it's still more than a decade away
from ever becoming a drug.