A huge dose of the measles vaccine has killed a woman's cancer

In an unprecedented trial, doctors in the US have rid a woman of cancer by injecting her with 100 billion units of a modified measles virus.

Image: DTKUTOO/Shutterstock

The idea of using a virus to kill cancer isn't new - studies on the subject date back as far as the 1950s, and the process has previously been shown to work in mice.
But this is the first well-documented case of a human patient going into complete remission after being exposed to a virus. And it could be HUGE.
The patient, Stacy Erholtz was battling severe myeloma, a blood cancer that affects bone marrow. In a last attempt to save her life, doctors at the Mayo Clinic injected her with 100 billion units of the measles virus - enough to inoculate 10 million people.
The experiment was part of a two-patient clinical trial, and the results have been pretty amazing.
Over the next few weeks, a tumour that had been pressing into her brain disappeared completely, and eventually the other tumours in her body did too. After just that one dose, Erholtz's cancer went into remission and she has now been clear of the disease for over six months, according to a press release.
The lead researcher Stephen Russell told The Washington Post:  "What this all tells us is something we never knew before – we never knew you could do this in people,” Russell said. “It’s a very important landmark because now we know it can happen. It’s a game changer. And I think it will drive a development in the field.”
However, before we can get too excited, these results need to be confined in a large randomised clinical trial. Also, the procedure wasn't as successful on the other female patient in the trial. While her tumours seemed to shrink for a little while, they eventually came back.
The idea behind the treatment - which is part of a field known as oncolytic virotherapy - is that the virus infects cancer cells and uses them as hosts to replicate their own genetic material, before causing them to explode.
Another clinical trial is scheduled to launch by September to see if the massive measles dose works on a large number of patients. Eventually it could become a standard - and quick - treatment for myeloma.
"We believe this could become a single-shot cure," Russell explains in the Mayo Clinic video below.

Source: The Washington Post, Mayo Clinic, Star Tribune