Mayo Clinic Trial: 10-Year Cancer Patient Cured by Measles Vaccine
The Mayo Clinic trial managed to use a modified version of the measles vaccine to eradicate one Minnesota woman's blood cancer, according to reports. 49-year-old Stacy Erholtz had been living with incurable myeloma for 10 years before researchers discovered her and put her in the experimental virotherapy trial last year.
The Mayo Clinic trial involved Erholtz and another patient who were both chosen because their immune systems were compromised and they had limited exposure to measles. This way, when they were injected with 100 billion units of measles virus— that's enough vaccine for 10 million people— their bodies couldn't fight it off before it began to attack the cancer. Although the other patient's cancer began to return after nine months, Erholtz's tumors shrank and six months later she is still cancer-free.
"It's a huge milestone in that regard," Dr. Steven Russell, a hematologist at the clinic who spearheaded the study, told KARE 11 News. "We have known for some time viruses act like a vaccine. If you inject a virus into a tumor you can provoke the immune system to destroy that cancer and other cancers. This is different, it puts the virus into bloodstream, it infects and destroys the cancer, debulks it, and then the immune system can come and mop up the residue."
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"It's like a call to action. It's not just good for our virus. It's good for every virus everybody's developing as a cancer therapy. We know this can happen," he added.
Erholtz said that five minutes into the procedure, she began to get a terrible headache. After that came nausea, vomiting and a fever of 105 degrees. But just 36 hours later, she told researchers that the tumor on her forehead was shrinking.
Erholtz, a mother from Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, said she had exhausted all her other options before the experimental study.
"My mindset was I didn't have any other options available, so why wouldn't I do it? I had to have failed all conventional treatment to do that trial. That actually happened last March," she said. "It was the easiest treatment by far with very few side effects. I hope it's the future of treating cancer infusion."
Now the measles virus MV-NIS is being tested against ovarian, brain, head and neck cancers and mesothelioma, KARE reported. Researchers are moving forward to phase two clinical trials with more patients, and with some luck, they could get FDA approval within four years.
