Chemist, Eli Lilly

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.