Posted on 05/15/2014 6:27:05 AM PDT by xzins
Stacy Erholtz, like many, has been inoculated with the measles vaccine, except she received a dose big — enough that it could have served 10 million people. No, this isn’t a precaution against the disease as more measles outbreaks become apparent, but it is actually part of an experimental trial to use the vaccine to fight cancer.
Mayo Clinic researchers used this form of “virotherapy,” when you infect cancerous cells and kill them with virus while leaving normal cells untouched, to treat multiple myeloma. The idea of using a virus to destroy cancer goes back several decades, but this study is the first to demonstrate its effectiveness in human subjects. A previous study showed the technique working in mice.
Only two people were involved in the clinical trial, receiving one dose of the engineered measles virus, which is toxic to myeloma plasma cells. Afterward, both patients saw a reduction in bone marrow cancer and myeloma protein.
One of these patients, Erholtz, went into full remission and remained cancer-free for nine months before experiencing a small relapse. Erholtz received no other treatment aside from the modified measles virus, but researchers did note that she developed a bad headache during the treatment. She also experienced a fever for a few days.
The second patient didn’t sustain the same results as Erholtz, but the researchers told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that if they had given that patient a stronger dose, they think they would have seen a better outcome. Through specialized imaging, they still found that the virus was attacking the tumors though.
The newspaper noted that a normal vaccine dose contains 10,000 infectious units of the measles virus, which most people’s immune systems are able fight off. The patients in this trial were first given 1 million infectious units, but the virus wasn’t effective against the cancer cells until they reached 100 billion infectious units.
“This is the first study to establish the feasibility of systemic oncolytic virotherapy for disseminated cancer,” Dr. Stephen a Mayo Clinic hematologist and co-developer of the therapy, said in a statement. “These patients were not responsive to other therapies and had experienced several recurrences of their disease.”
Erholtz told the Star Tribune that she thinks she’ll be cleared as cancer free next month.
“We don’t let the cancer cloud hang over our house, let’s put it that way, or we would have lived in the dark the last 10 years,” Erholtz told the newspaper.
This virotherapy is now being manufactured for larger clinical trial.
The study was published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
continuing to pray for cures for all types of cancers
hope this works out
Wasn’t there a story last week about using polio virus to kill cancer? Think it was at Duke. Yes, here it is.
http://www.newsmaxhealth.com/Health-News/polio-virus-brain-cancer-glioblastoma-Duke-Cancer-Institute/2013/05/24/id/506190/
Thank you Vinnie
I wonder if the effectiveness is the same if you’ve been
inoculated before or if this has to be the first time your body has received the vaccine.
Good question. I don’t see it addressed in the article.
Educated guess only, but I’d say the subjects were immune and the huge viral load is needed to overcome natural defenses.
In the US, it would be hard to find adults who are not immune to measles.
shhhhh..... don’t tell the anti-vaccers
I find this astonishing and VERY Promising!
” ...engineered form of the virus that is harmless to normal cells, but attacks cancer cells. “
shhhhh, don’t tell the chemo producers.
that too....I am no fan of chemo...it is the most nasty thing ever conceived by the brains of some stupid people. It kills more than it helps.
Somehow I missed that one and I’m here at Duke.
Two of my children work making the measles vaccine... for Merck. This should help demand high.
Dr. Alice Krippin: Indeed, yes. In this case the measles, um, virus which has been engineered at a genetic level to be helpful rather than harmful. Um, I find the best way to describe it is if you can... if you can imagine your body as a highway, and you picture the virus as a very fast car, um, being driven by a very bad man. Imagine the damage that car can cause. Then if you replace that man with a cop... the picture changes. And that's essentially what we've done.
TV Personality: And how many people have you treated so far?
Dr. Alice Krippin: Well, we've had ten thousand and nine clinical trials in humans so far.
TV Personality: And how many are cancer-free?
Dr. Alice Krippin: Ten thousand and nine.
TV Personality: So you have actually cured cancer.
Dr. Alice Krippin: Yes, yes... yes, we have.
[cuts to post-apocalyptic New York three years later]
[excerpt from "I Am Legend"]
The good news...your cancer is gone.
The bad news...you’ll have to spend the rest of your life in an iron lung. (showing my age)
BTW.. the Museum of History in Raleigh has an iron lung on display. Remember them from my youth.
“BTW.. the Museum of History in Raleigh has an iron lung on display. Remember them from my youth.”
I knew a man who had to sleep in an iron lung every evening. He owned a small store where he worked during the day and to survive he slept in an iron lung each night.
I collect old medical books. Some of the old procedures are bizarre to say the least. Used to discuss them with a client who was a psychiatrist that received his MD degree in 1924. We spent a lot of time together in the 1990’s as he was still practicing full time at age 94. He shared a lot of the work with shock treatments, lobotomies, extreme drug treatments and his experiences touring the Eastern Bloc communist countries and seeing patients chained to beds. I find the whole field fabulously interesting.
These experiences are what led me into doing research on the anatomy and physiology of the human soul and how it interfaces with the physical body. It’s much more interesting that most people realize, and it beats crossword puzzles. There is a common body of knowledge that fills the gap and bridges medicine, psychology, neuroscience, anatomy & physiology, and religion(s). It’s almost time for it to become public. (Without discounting any of them.)
Perhaps what you are missing is that without these vaccinations, natural selection would possibly bring about immunity and as new strains develop this same process would continue to protect the species.
Imagine this though... what if... what if cancer is a result of misguided autoimmune function... where viral infection, had tasked and tuned the body to defend against cancer?
Now everyone is allergic to gluten or has breast cancer... or both.
Remember when saturated fat was bad? Oops.
Remember how mothers would dump hand sanitizer all over Junior every 5 minutes? Oops.
You are completely ignorant as to the importance of vaccinations. You apparently have never lived through the epidemics and the ravages that diseases which are now considered dead in the civilized world wrought.
Measles kills, leaves survivors deaf and blind. Polio kills, leaves survivors crippled and sometimes on an iron lung. I could go on but I won’t.
Anti-vaccers are like pacifists....they want others to die in their place
The only bad part was the 2 week quarantine!
There is an interesting documentary on Netflix called Nazi Medicine. Where their ideas came from and where their research went...very chilling look on 20th century science.
You are fortunate. Not every one was so lucky
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