Scientists develop a simple method to make drug precursor 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 of the Feb. 21 issue of the Royal Society of Chemistry journal ChemComm. The lab's new process replaces silver with cerium-based ceric ammonium nitrate (CAN), which produces functional precursors under mild conditions in about 30 minutes.