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LAWRENCE — Findings by a University of Kansas researcher that could help development of better cancer treatments will be published in the February issue of Nature, the world's most cited science journal.

An 18-month experiment by Emily Scott, associate professor of medicinal chemistry at KU, identified the shape of an enzyme that leads to growth of prostate and breast cancer. By defining the shape of the enzyme — cytochrome P450 17A1 — more effective drugs can be developed to treat cancer patients, KU officials said.

Previous prostate and cancer drug development has relied on computations to produce best guesses on the enzyme's shape. Those guesses not only yield less effective drugs, but can lead to side effects in many patients, officials said.

Scott's research was funded by a pair of one-year $55,000 grants from the National Institutes of Health. In October, she applied for a five-year $250,000 grant from NIH to continue the project's work toward initial drug design.

She said ultimately it was possible that KU could continue work on the drug through formulation in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.

"With pharmaceutical companies doing less and less drug discovery and drug development, it's becoming more of an academic arena. Here at KU we have already established several components of that process, and the expertise, and that's something I think the institution wants to push forward," Scott said.