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 the 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.

"A lot of our remedies come from things like herbal medicines, " Soloway says. "They're not all out of test tubes."

In 2001, the Ecuadoran patient confided in Soloway that he had been taking an local remedy in addition to the treatment he was getting in Miami. It was an extract made by boiling the root of an Amazonian plant. In Ecuador, Colombia and other Andes nations, it was said to fight cancer, lupus, maybe even AIDS.

It had been developed in the 1970s, he said, by a respected local cancer and immunology specialist, Dr. Edwin Sevallos, director of the Tumor Institute of Ecuador in Quito. Sevallos had impressive credentials -- a degree in medical surgery from the Central University of Ecuador, post-graduate work in oncology and radiotherapy at the Autonomous University of Mexico.

On Cevallos' website, the medicine sounds exotic: "One of the primary ingredients is the extract of a plant in the Solanaceae family. It grows deep in the Ecuadoran forest giving the plant its unique qualities -- the properties of the mineral rich, volcanic soil of the Amazon."

Locals called the plant dulcamara, Latin for "bittersweet." The name Cevallos gave the elixir extracted from it was less exotic -- "BIRM, " for Biological Immune Response Modifier."

Intrigued, Solomon turned to two UM associate professors in the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, Dr. Bal Lokeshwar, a researcher in prostate cancer, and Dr. Vinata Lokeshwar, his wife, a researcher in bladder cancer.

Their charge: investigate BIRM "in vitro, " meaning in laboratory Petrie dishes, and "in vivo, " meaning, in this case, in rats.

For the in vitro part, they put a few ounces of cells from a cancerous human prostate in a Petrie dish, then added BIRM, at doses from 1 part per million to 100 parts per million. The goal was to see what concentration of BIRM was needed to kill 50 percent of the cancer cells. The answer turned out surprisingly low -- only eight parts per million.

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