ARTICLE IN THE MIAMI HERALD

Mystery cure?

An Indiana Jones adventure involving an Amazon plant, University of Miami researchers and a possible new treatment for prostate cancer.

At first, it didn’t sound like the way a modern cancer treatment would be created. As the story went, it was
an elixir extracted from the root of a mysterious plant found deep in Athe Amazon forest in Ecuador, used there for decades against everything from lupus to AIDS.

It was brought to Miami by a Quito businessman who was being treated here for prostate cancer, which eventually killed him. The Ecuadoran doctor who developed the elixir was trying to patent it, so he was being evasive about the plant and the process by which the extract is made. So what made Dr. Mark Soloway, chairman of urologic oncology at the University of Miami School of Medicine and a member of the UM/Sylvester Cancer Center, take it seriously enough to ask UM researchers to look into it? ‘‘He [the businessman] was a very bright fellow,’’ Soloway says. ‘‘I had done surgery on him. We’d become friends. He brought a bottle of it with him, and put me in touch with the doctor in Ecuador.

‘‘I said, ‘Well, shoot. Let’s see if this really works.’ ’’ Between that beginning and today — when the liquid has passed its first scientific tests and been found worthy of a $1.2 million grant for further research from the National Institutes of Health’s Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine — lies a fascinating tale. It’s an Indiana Jones adventure, with researchers scouring the globe from Quito to Germany to Africa in search of botanists who could identify the plant and experts in plant science and even nuclear magnetic resonance trying to crack its chemical makeup.

Soloway isn’t expecting a cure for cancer. But this might become a valuable addition to more traditional ways of treating men whose cancers have defeated all other means.

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