The title of the article is: "Sequential treatment of drug-resistant tumors with targeted minicells containing siRNA or a cytotoxic drug," which will not win any awards for literary felicity. But this was the article passed to me last night by a technologist friend and appearing in the June issue of Nature Biotechnology. He'd gotten it from his father, also an engineer. His mother has Stage 4 lung cancer. I'm told the article is circulating—since its publication June 28—among the community of people who are hoping for a cure and watching the clock. It's also getting some interesting attention from people who know the business and the science: It's in the No. 1 spot on HotCites—a social bookmarking site for biomedical types.

The substance of the article is that a company called EnGeneIC, in New South Wales, Australia, has announced an ameliorative therapy for a broad range of cancers that shows 100 percent survival and zero toxicity of mouse subjects with xenografted human cancers over two years.

It's very hard to judge the truth value of this from superficials. The lead author, Jennifer MacDiarmid, and several of her collaborators are principals in EnGeneIC, a corporation formed in 2001. So this could be the gene industry equivalent of a press release. And yet ... and yet there's that 100 percent survival claim, which is a very, very hard claim for a scientist to make (at least a scientist with concern for his or her reputation in a profession and an industry with a long memory) unless it's true. Plenty of drugs—stuff out there saving lives daily—were initially presented with far less startling claims of efficacy. Or to put it another way, if you're testing known-good antibiotics against known nonresistant strains of bacteria in vivo, you might approach 100 percent survival for a short-term study, but you'd typically lose subjects due to adverse reactions and other unknowns, so you probably wouldn't claim it.

Indeed, in many ways, it's more credible to claim less than perfect results, and the temptation to hedge that way, knowing that you are being judged by clever, competitive peers, must be very great, even when making claims on behalf of a company in which you have a material interest.

Unless all the mice actually did survive, in which case, I guess you shrug, report the result, open a split of the good champagne and proceed to human trials, as these folks are apparently doing.

Specifically, what they're claiming to have invented and now tested is a method for inserting siRNAs, or small, interfering RNA duplexes, into so-called minicells, derived from bacteria and targeted to tumor-cell-surface receptors. siRNAs have been getting a lot of research attention over the past decade because they can be used to silence gene expression, so they figure in a lot of research involving "turning genes on and off," and have long been discussed as offering a potential means for nanosurgically altering the function of tumor and other misbehaving cells.

In the EnGeneIC therapy, these siRNA-bearing targeted minicells are administered in a first wave, during which they migrate to the tumor surface, penetrate tumor cell walls and release their siRNA payloads, which then go to work knocking down the tumor cell's emission of a resistance protein that defends it against chemotherapy. A second wave of minicells is then administered to deliver a chemotherapeutic/cytotoxic payload, which the tumor cells are now defenseless against. The result, EnGeneIC says, verges on perfect: The tumors die back, and because the targeted delivery system applies the cytotoxin precisely, and in minuscule quantity, the mice thrive.

Clearly, this is not a universal cure. In fact, it's not any kind of cure. Applying this strategy would seem to require a very close understanding of tumor resistance (though this is increasingly well understood), and depends on the ability to devise and produce gene-modulating siRNA formulations tuned to work against each evolved resistance mode. And apparently all it does is shrink tumors—it doesn't attack the underlying propensity of particular organisms, in particular conditions, to pop tumor cells. But it harks forward to a time when cancer may become, in some ways like AIDS in Western nations, a "manageable condition," allowing for long-term survival and high quality of life.