Cerium sidelines silver to make drug precursor – Phys.org

Save your silver! It’s better used for jewelry than as a catalyst for drugs.
Rice University scientists have developed a greatly simplified method to make fluoroketones, precursors for drug design and manufacture that typically require a silver catalyst.
Rice chemist Julian West and graduate students Yen-Chu Lu and Helen Jordan introduced a process for the rapid and scalable synthesis of fluoroketones that have until now been challenging and expensive to make.
Their open-access work graces the cover…

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