It was a curious partnership from the start: A cancer researcher who dabbled in winemaking, and an engineer turned winemaker who wanted nothing to do with traditional treatments for his cancer.

The winemaker died – too soon, his doctor believes.

But he left a legacy of friendship and intellectual curiosity that seeded an endowment that's grown to $800,000, and helped support intriguing research into a fermented wheat germ extract.

"The results so far are very promising," said Dr. Joe Tuscano, a UC Davis oncologist studying the remedy brought to him by his patient.

Tumor-prone mice given just the right doses of key proteins from the wheat germ survived, even after 80 percent of their untreated cohorts died, Tuscano said.

He has isolated 17 different proteins he thinks might be responsible, and he is applying for funds to begin testing in humans. That's a crucial next step, because many things that cure cancer in mice don't work nearly as well – or at all – in people.

Whatever Tuscano learns about fermented wheat germ will stand as a memorial to the man who was his patient and became his friend, winemaker Norman deLeuze.

"I like to think of him as a collaborator," said Tuscano. "He was very smart … very stubborn. He thought chemotherapy was poison and he didn't want to be poisoned."

Hardworking and focused, deLeuze had been an engineer for Aerojet in Rancho Cordova before setting out with a friend to found ZD Wines in Sonoma County in the late 1960s.

The initials stood for the two friends' names, and also for "zero defects," a quality control slogan at Aerojet, said his son, Brett deLeuze.

Brett deLeuze remembers his father as a scientist and builder, a man who held engineering jobs for 10 years while sweating every weekend to establish the winery. He would go sailing or work on cars with his three children, and he drew them all into the family business.

"He loved family. He was very family-oriented. We all worked together, pretty much all of our lives," his son said.

DeLeuze was also "a health nut from very early on," devoted to exercising and foods he thought would promote health, from flaxseed to raw nuts. He didn't eat sugar. He would boast that he planned to live to 120.

Cancer, his son said, "was not part of the plan."

Once a cancer diagnosis came, when deLeuze was in his early 70s, conventional treatments weren't part of the plan either.

DeLeuze had mantle cell lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system that is a relatively uncommon variation of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Standard treatment, Tuscano said, is chemotherapy followed by a bone marrow transplant, with its cargo of beneficial stem cells. On average, patients who undergo those treatments live five years, he said.

Brett deLeuze remembers his father telling the family that chemotherapy would only buy him a little time, time he would rather devote to feeling better and exploring other options.

He dove into his own research, and experimented with radio-wave machines, vitamin C and Avemar, a fermented wheat germ extract developed in Hungary.

He was frustrated about how little data there was to support any of those options, Brett deLeuze said, and he went looking for doctors willing to study alternative remedies he was trying on himself.

He asked Tuscano to study several things, but the doctor, who calls himself "very data-driven," would agree to only one – the Avemar.

"I saw with my own eyes that his tumor was shrinking," said Tuscano. He tested Avemar in lab dishes, and found it killed cancer cells. He went on to test it in mice.

At the same time, Tuscano was having conversation after conversation with deLeuze, outlining in detail the standard treatments that he believed could prolong the winemaker's life.

"I worked on him pretty hard," Tuscano said. "He was smart enough to understand the consequences. … He wanted to use himself as a guinea pig to find something. He was on a mission."

It is a course Tuscano came to respect, although he would never recommend it.

Call The Bee's Carrie Peyton Dahlberg, (916) 321-1086.