Health [Update] Mayo Clinic trial: Massive blast of measles vaccine wipes out cancer

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Stacy Erholtz was out of conventional treatment options for blood cancer last June when she underwent an experimental trial at the Mayo Clinic that injected her with enough measles vaccine to inoculate 10 million people.

The 50-year-old Pequot Lakes mother is now part of medical history.

The cancer, which had spread widely through her body, went into complete remission and was undetectable in Erholtz’s body after just one dose of the measles vaccine, which has an uncanny affinity for certain kinds of tumors.

Erholtz was one of just two subjects in the experiment and the only one to achieve complete remission. But the experiment provides the “proof of concept” that a single, massive dose of intravenous viral therapy can kill cancer by overwhelming its natural defenses, according to Dr. Stephen Russell, a professor of molecular medicine who spearheaded the research at Mayo.

“It’s a landmark,” Russell said in an interview last week. “We’ve known for a long time that we can give a virus intravenously and destroy metastatic cancer in mice. Nobody’s shown that you can do that in people before.”

Read more here. (Star Tribune)
 

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Also, she combusted spontanously, but that is an unimportant side effect.
 

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Be Skeptical of That Measles "Cure" for Cancers

Yesterday, physicians at the Mayo Clinic announced that Stacy Erholtz, a 49-year-old woman diagnosed with a fearsome cancer called multiple myeloma, had gone into remission. But don’t buy into headlines you read that measles cure cancer. It’s a bit more complicated than that.

For Erholtz, remission is a fantastic sign. Multiple myeloma is a nasty cancer, and most patients succumb after only four to five years even if their doctors catch it early. Stacy’s doctors tried a battery of chemotherapy and stem cell treatments before turning to an experimental procedure involving the measles virus.

They injected her with an engineered measles virus that looks a lot like the measles vaccine. They gave her a lot—enough of the virus to vaccinate 10 million people. And it worked.

Despite the excited headlines, the doctors didn’t exactly say that measles could cure cancer. Stephen Russell, a hematologist and lead author on the paper, told Reuters yesterday: “We have an enormous amount of work to do. We haven’t discovered a cure for cancer here."

One big reason to be skeptical? The Mayo Clinic says that only one of the six people who received the treatment went into remission. The clinic tried curing four other multiple myeloma patients with measles virus, and none of them got better. One other patient responded but didn’t go into remission. In a more pessimistic world, then, yesterday’s headlines could have read “Measles Virus Has No Effect on Most Cancer Patients” instead of “Woman’s Cancer Killed By Measles Virus.”

Read more here. (Popular Mechanics)
 
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