An ISU professor is exploring periwinkle plants in hopes of making chemotherapy drugs more affordable for cancer patients.

Jacqueline Shanks, professor of chemical engineering, is trying to find a way for the Catharanthus roseus to produce more indole alkaloids, which are used to treat non-Hodkin’s lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia and other cancers.

Shanks plans to attend the Plant Metabolic Engineering Conference in Tilton, N.H. from July 10 to 15 to discuss her research, which was published in the AIChE Journal, a publication of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, in January.

“It will be people from around the world that work in plant metabolic engineering,” Shanks said.

She is scheduled to present July 14 for 40 minutes under the topic of plants as chemical factories.

Shanks said her initial motivation for the research came when her sister, Jenny Johnson, Des Moines, was diagnosed with non-Hodkin’s lymphoma in the late 1980s while Shanks was attending graduate school at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

“One way to cope for me was to go to the library and see what I could find about it, what was being used to treat it, and why she got it,” Shanks said.

Her sister has since made a full recovery.

Shanks is working in collaboration with Ka-Yiu San, professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering at Rice University, and Sue Gibson, associate professor of plant biology at the University of Minnesota.

The National Science Foundation is funding its research with collaborative grants totaling $588,848.

“Sue does the most advanced molecular biology, and Ka-Yiu knows how to routinely put those tools into a plant system now,” Shanks said.

She said her role in the research comes from her knowledge of analytical chemistry tools, as well as her background with the periwinkle plant and how to culture it.

Guy Sander, ISU graduate student in chemical engineering, helps Shanks with research and experiments on the rose-colored periwinkle plant.

“I did not originally plan to work in a bio-related field,” Sander said. “After I spoke with Jackie about her research, I was impressed with her multi-disciplinary work incorporating plant science, biochemistry, computation and engineering.”

In the future, Shanks hopes her research can not only make chemotherapy drugs more affordable for cancer patients, but that the information she uncovers will be important in general for identifying valuable plant chemicals.

“The ideal picture would be that other researchers could use this approach and that we would be able to make more plant medicinal compounds,” Shanks said.