Science has turned one of humankind’s enemies into a potential lifesaver.  Mayo Clinic researchers have successfully treated two patients diagnosed with “incurable” blood cancer with a radical new therapy in which a massive dose of a modified Measles Virus destroyed the malignancy.

49-year old Stacy Erholtz spent a being treated for Multiple Myeloma, only to have it relapse time and time again.  Doctors at the famed facility in Rochester, Minnesota gave her and five other patients a dose of a highly concentrated, lab-engineered virus similar to the measles vaccine.  Each was potent enough to inoculate millions of people against measles.  But these viruses were engineered to attack cancer.

“The idea here is that a virus can be trained to specifically damage a cancer and to leave other tissues in the body unharmed,” said Mayo Clinic hematologist Dr. Steven Russell, who spearheaded the study.  “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.”

By ‘debulks’, he means that the measles virus makes cancer cells join together and explode.  It didn’t work on every patient, and the technique still needs more research.  But researchers are confident the principle is the same for most cancers, and Stacy Erholtz’s results should be encouraging for all researchers developing viruses to kill cancer cells.