London

Feeling short of funds for that convertible sports car or Caribbean holiday? For those with the right blend of chemistry skills, mountains of cash are now available: all you have to do is synthesize some valuable but awkward molecules on a freelance basis.

Eli Lilly, the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company, is offering cash rewards of up to $100,000 to researchers who can help it to solve bottlenecks in its drug-discovery programmes. The company has posted a list of more than 20 molecules on the Internet and is asking anyone with the know-how — from postgraduate students to retired university professors — to come up with better ways of making them.

For example, the company needs a new way to synthesize a particularly tricky bicycloketo ethyl ester. Avoid “highly toxic reagents and solvents” and stay within “−30 °C to 150 °C” and you could earn $80,000 — if you can deliver several grams of the ester by 31 October and your method is judged to be the best. Researchers who do not have access to laboratory facilities can also have a go at cracking the conundrums: paper solutions are being accepted for some of them.

Since launching its new web-based venture — called InnoCentive — last month, Lilly says it has had an “extraordinary” response. But the problems clearly leave many would-be contestants scratching their heads: the 900 or so people who have registered for full details have so far submitted just a handful of solutions between them.

The company expects to award its first cash prize early next month, says Alpheus Bingham, vice-president of research and development for Lilly's venture-capital arm, who is heading the project.

Adam Nelson, an organic chemist who specializes in asymmetric synthesis at the University of Leeds in Britain, says the problems do not look too tricky. “They're not fiendishly difficult,” he says. “In fact, they're the kind of problems that an average PhD student will be solving a lot of the time. But clearly there's a methodology gap here.” Some lab-scale solutions will prove difficult to scale up to produce the large quantities needed for industry, for example.

Nelson plans to set one of his students to work on one of the problems: a substituted thiophene with a $70,000 reward. “It's exactly the sort of chemistry that we do,” he says. Researchers in other fields should also stay tuned: Bingham says that more problems, this time in biology and informatics, will be posted soon.

http://www.innocentive.com