Vinata Lokeshwar then had to persuade Bonny Cevallos, the Ecuadoran doctor's daughter, to breach the family secrecy enough to deliver one of the plants to the botanist. But when the botanist's report came back, it said the plant wasn't Solanum dulcamara after all -- but a related species.

"Dulcamara is Latin for 'bittersweet, ' " Bal Lokeshwar points out. "There are a lot of plants called that in Ecuador."

So now the UM researchers and the NIH know what the plant is, but can't reveal it because of their confidentiality agreement with Cevallos.

In an exchange of e-mails between The Miami Herald and Cevallos in Quito, the doctor said he got his U.S. patent July 31 -- but he still won't say exactly where the plant comes from, or whether it is wild or cultivated.

"This is confidential information and we cannot discuss it with the media, " he said.

Finally, the NIH wanted to know whether the chief medicinal component in the plant could be reproduced.

Vinata Lokeshwar scoured the world for experts. In Nigeria, she found Dr. Donatus Ebere Okwu, a plant chemist who had worked with similar plants. In Germany, she found Dr. E. Pascher, who had experience in looking at similar compounds with nuclear magnetic resonance, to learn the plant's chemical makeup.

They reported their findings to the UM researchers and the NIH -- again, confidentially. Finally in August came the good news: The NIH would provide a $1.2 million grant to study BIRM.

"The research into BIRM is preliminary, but we hope the results will provide insight into whether this plant might work, " said .Barbara Sorkin, Ph.D., NCCAM program officer, in an e-mail. "In the long run, this information may help people and their health care providers make more informed choices.

With the grant secure, UM researchers now face three to four years of further pre-clinical trials to make sure BIRM is effective against cancer at doses that remain nontoxic.

Then more tests with rodents to see if it really works, and whether it works best alone or combined with other compounds. And, since prostate cancer in both rats and humans proceeds in slow stages, the question is whether BIRM is better against one stage or another.

The final stage would be testing in humans.

At that point, Bal Lokeshwar says, UM might try to enlist a major pharmaceutical company to share the cost of testing -- which can reach $100 million -- to win FDA approval to put the drug on the market.

Final success -- if it comes -- is years away.

Bal Lokeshwar stresses that neither he nor UM have financial interests in BIRM. It doesn't bother him that he might do much of the work only to see others profit.

Soloway, too, is interested only in a therapeutic outcome: "If you could have a safe, active remedy that worked against cancer in a liquid form so you could just take a teaspoon a day, it would be very valuable."

And even if BIRM succeeds, Bal Lokeshwar says he and his fellow researchers still won't break out the champagne.

"We don't celebrate. We're scientists. Our reward is to do the work, not to win the prize."

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