Measles Virus Kills Woman’s Blood Cancer in a Two-Patient Trial

Myeloma is an incurable blood cancer that affects bone marrow and is diagnosed in 1 in 149 people in the United States. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic recently conducted a study with a myeloma patient and their results were astounding.

Stacy Erholtz, a Minnesota woman suffering from myeloma, was one of the two patients involved in the study. Rounds of chemotherapy treatments hadn't shown progress with her, and she soon found out she had tumors growing all over her body, including one destroying bone in her skull and pushing on her brain.

The clinical trial used the measles virus in hopes of treating the cancer. Erholtz was injected with 100 billion units of the virus, which is enough to inoculate 10 million people. Within minutes, she was suffering from a terrible headache, and a few hours later she was shaking and vomiting. The hour of injections didn't seem to show much progress.

But the doctors witnessed notable progress after 36 hours. The tumor destroying her skull began to shrink, as did others throughout her body. Now Erholtz is free of myeloma for six months thanks to the audacious trial conducted by the Mayo Clinic doctors. The study, "Taming Measles Virus to Create an Efficient Cancer Therapeutic," was published on Tuesday in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

"The choice of the measles virus (MV) as a therapeutic agent for myeloma was not happenstance, but rather the result of several years of thoughtful biological experimentation and rational virus engineering," Dr. John Bell, the study's lead author, wrote. "Russell et al recognized several features of myeloma that would complement the life cycle of MV."

However, the trial did not help the other participant, but the researchers believe that the results from Erholtz are promising. The other patient possessed tumors primarily in her leg muscles, whereas Erholtz had a majority in her bone marrow. The doctors are unsure why this was, but their next step will be another clinical trial where a large number of patients will receive massive measles virus doses to test the effectiveness of the treatment. It's expected to begin in September.