Cape Town - US doctors have cured a woman with advanced blood cancer by injecting her with the measles virus.
Stacy Erholtz, 50, from the US state of Minnesota, was losing the battle against myeloma, a blood cancer that affects bone marrow.
She had been through chemotherapy and stem cell treatments, but scans still showed body tumours.
As part of a two-patient clinical trial conducted by the US non-profit Mayo Clinic, doctors injected her with a very high dose of the measles virus.
Within 36 hours of the injection, the tumours started shrinking and over the next several weeks disappeared completely.
After just one dose Erholtz’s cancer went into remission and she has since been completely cleared of the disease.
The lead researcher, Dr Stephen Russell, said that they had engineered the virus to make it more suitable for cancer therapy.
The treatment was only successful in one of the two patients in this proof-of-concept study, which was published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
The Cancer Association of South Africa’s head of research Dr Carl Albrecht said this was an exciting development and that he was optimistic about how this might influence cancer treatment in the future as virotherapy was very precise and had the toxicity of normal chemotherapy – which would minimise the side effects of treatment.
According to Albrecht, researchers have been experimenting with virology as a tool against cancer for decades and the first real success was achieved about 10 years ago with the development of Herceptin, an antibody that fights a certain type of breast cancer (HER2 positive).
He warned that although this was a positive development it still had to undergo extensive testing in large clinical trials, which wouldl take a lot of time and money, before it could be considered a safe and effective form of cancer therapy.
Whether this virotherapy with the measles virus may work for other cancers will also have to be determined by further research, Albrecht said. – Health-e News Service.