Mysterious Plant May Cure Prostate Cancer

by mpress | October 16, 2007 at 03:30 am

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Every day, University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive
Cancer Center physicians and scientists perform important basic and
clinical research in an effort to better understand, and help prevent,
diagnose, and cure cancers and other diseases. Two notable studies have
recently appeared in the news – one on an extremely effective breast
cancer treatment, and the other on the role of proteases in tumors.

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 seriously 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 That he asked UM researchers to look into it?

The Solanum dulcamara plant for years was believed to be the source of the anti-prostate cancer elixer from Ecuador. But when plant scientists investigated, it turned out the elixer is not from this plant but from a closely related species.

It was brought to Miami by a Quito businessman who was being treated here for prostate cancer, which eventually killed him.

”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.

Read full Story: MH