Hong Kong (AsiaNews/SCMP) – Chinese-American biochemist Alexander Sun has come up with a simple herbal remedy in the fight against cancer.

Born in Hunan province and raised in Taiwan, Dr Sun moved to the US in the 1960s. In an interview he stated he was motivated by a desire to lessen the pain his lung-cancer patient mother was experiencing. He decided to try out herbal medicines 20 years ago after radiotherapy and chemotherapy failed to stem her worsening lung cancer.

Three months after she started drinking the herbal soup, surgeons removed a tumour and she lived tumour-free for another 17 years.

Dr Sun's herbal remedy is now in its clinical trial phase in the US. If it is approved by the US Federal Food and Drug Administration it could be on sale as a drug by the end of next year. For the time being it is sold freeze-dried in small bags as a dietary supplement.

The soup mix consists of a blend of soy beans, shiitake mushrooms, ginger, ginseng, mung beans, olive, liquorice, leeks, parsley and hawthorn fruit.

Dr Sun, 65, studied both traditional Chinese and Western medicine at the University of California at Berkeley. He now lives in Manhattan and works in a lab in Connecticut.

His work has been dismissed by many doubters but Dr. Steve Lai, chief consultant of the Hong Kong-based United Asia Medical Network, was one of the first to apply the herbal therapy to cancer patients four years ago.

"More than half of the desperate stage-IV cancer patients had their condition significantly improved after they took it," he said. "This is amazing considering the fact that these are people doomed to die in the eyes of a conventional oncologist."

"In my 20 years experience as a cancer doctor," Dr Lai added, "Dr Sun's soup is the best single drug in use for being most effective and least toxic."