Last week, an Israeli biotech company claimed it would have the cure for cancer within a year, sparking a media frenzy in which the likes of The New York Post, NBC, and US News seemed to have accepted their claims without question. The only problem is — there’s actually little to no evidence to back up their claims, Forbes reports. 

The supposed “cure” created by Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies LtD, a company founded in 2000 from the Israeli technology incubator ITEK Weizmann claimed to “attack receptors three at a time,” making their supposed treatment faster-acting than any cancer would be able to mutate, according to the initial press release posted about their emerging research.

But scientists across the research community, including the American Cancer Society, quickly pointed out that this is categorically untrue: cancers can have up to tens of thousands of DNA mutations in their genomes, many of which are the “receptors” researchers vaguely referred to in their press release about the study. 

What’s more, the Israeli company also claimed that their therapy would work for all types of cancer. To those in the cancer community, this is an immediate red flag — there are broadly over 200 types of cancer we know about in existence, and for one treatment to address them all would be highly unlikely, if not impossible from a medical standpoint. 

Thirdly, the research has so far only been conducted on mice, meaning that it still has yet to be tested on other animal species, be formulated, and then be approved to be administered to humans in Phase 1 clinical trials. This would most definitely take more than a year for any cancer research company, nullifying the second part of the company’s claim. 

As one cancer research scientist, Dr. Darren Saunders, MD put it on Twitter, “It’s basically the Fyre festival of cancer cures. I can find very little published data, and the in vitro data on their website is underwhelming at best.”

Critics also say hearing about new “cancer cures” with little to no evidence backing them up can be incredibly detrimental and dangerous for the hundreds of thousands of physicians and researchers working toward the goal of creating better treatments for cancer. In a field so full of fake and unproven cures, it’s irresponsible for both biotech firms and mainstream media outlets to disseminate them.