Will a chemical compound from a tropical tree help end the scourge of liver cancer?

James Vyvyan, a chemistry professor at Western Washington University, is doing his part to find out.

He’s smart enough to know that most compounds don’t become successful health cures. He also knows that research is needed to find those that will help.

“There are many ways for a compound to fail,” he said. “Hopefully, we will learn enough to make an incremental step toward treatment.”

Vyvyan (pronounced “vivian”) has already researched a compound from sunflowers that might find use as an environmentally benign herbicide. The sunflower compound is similar in structure to a compound found in the lime-like fruit of the ylang-ylang (pronounced “lang-lang”) tree, native to the Philippines and Micronesia.

A research group in Taiwan recently found that the ylang-ylang compound shows promise inhibiting the growth of liver cancer. The problem is that it’s a painstaking process to extract the compound, canano-dine.

That’s where Vyvyan and a handful of WWU student researchers come in.

Backed by a three-year, $204,000 federal grant, they will begin work this summer to find a way to syn-thesize cananodine. They will also study how to make its close chemical cousins, called “analogues.” Sometimes, analogues are more successful treating disease than the original compound.

Any success would be welcome news in the cancer world.

This year, about 19,000 cases of liver cancer will be diagnosed in the United States, and nearly 17,000 Americans will die from the disease. Worldwide, an estimated one million people will die from it this year.

Liver cancer isn’t the most prevalent form of cancer in the country — prostate, lung and breast cancer top that sad list — but it may be the grimmest diagnosis.

For now, liver cancer can only be cured if it is found early. Treatment includes a liver transplant or re-moval of part of the liver, but surgery is an option in only about 10 percent of cases. There’s no cure for advanced liver cancer. None.

Native peoples in the South Pacific have used parts of the ylang-ylang tree to treat various ailments, in-cluding stomach and back pain, diarrhea, gonorrhea, malaria and fever.

Time will tell if liver cancer can be added to the list. A hopeful sign is that cananodine seems to focus only on cancer cells. Many cancer drugs also attack healthy cells.

“That’s why chemotherapy patients are so ill from the treatment,” Vyvyan said.

He hopes to find someone, perhaps a molecular biologist, to collaborate on his research. Someone with such expertise will be needed to figure out how cananodine and its chemical cousins inhibit cancer. If results are promising, further research will be needed to determine how a potential drug could be admin-istered with minimal side effects.

“Science is time-consuming and expensive,” he said. Vyvyan, 37, has loved science ever since he was a kid in Wisconsin playing with chemistry and ecology kits. A faculty member at Western for 10 years, he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

He chose Western, in part, because of its support for research and its strong undergraduate focus. He loves to teach, especially hands-on lab classes.

“I was fortunate to have really good teachers and professors,” he said. “I thought I could have a similar impact on the next generation.”