Measles Virus Puts Woman's Cancer Into Remission 74
clm1970 sends news that researchers from Mayo Clinic have successfully put a patient's cancer into remission using a modified measles virus. The researchers are quick to note that further trials are needed to determine whether these results are repeatable. Here are the two academic papers.
"Multiple myeloma in a 49-year-old woman seemed to disappear after she received an extremely high-dose injection of a measles virus engineered to kill the cancer cells. Multiple myeloma affects immune cells called plasma cells, which concentrate in the soft tissue, or marrow, inside bones. A second woman also with multiple myeloma began responding to the therapy, but her cancer eventually returned. Four other patients who received the high-dose therapy had no response. .. [Dr. Stephen Russell] and colleagues believe the two women who showed some response had few or no circulating measles antibodies, which might eliminate the engineered virus before it has a chance to kill the cancer cells. The therapy will now enter a mid-stage trial to see whether more patients with low circulating antibodies respond to high-doses of the virus, he said."
Neat... (Score:5, Interesting)
Multiple myeloma is forever.
My father's fighting multiple myeloma. He beat it into remission once with a marrow treatment, and after 5 years (which is about par for the course), it came back. Enough chemo pills to bankrupt a horse later, he's teetering on the brink of remission #2, but likely going to be taking a prophylactic/maintenance dose of chemo drugs until the next time it comes out of remission - which might be the cycle he's on for the rest of his life (which we now measure in +-5 year blocks).
There's a certain point in the process at which a painful year of chemo treatments or inpatient marrow treatments gambling for a 5-year remission in a 70-year old becomes a losing proposition, but knowing you can possibly press the snooze button on cancer through normal methods enough times that perhaps, perhaps, just get your Super Measles! shot someday for your next 5-years snooze is promising.
Here's hoping.
Re:What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)
The neat thing about terminal cancer patients is that the answer is "Not much that would be worse than the alternative."
Conversely, this high bar makes it very difficult to improve on invasive but adequate treatments. Consider mastectomy for early-stage breast cancer: it works pretty well, and that makes it damned near impossible to test any alternative treatment that might work just as well or better, and which would certainly be less invasive.
I worked on a cancer-therapy project once and had the clever idea of applying the technique we were using--which was aimed at something that was incurable at the time--to certain kinds of breast cancer, which was just similar enough to be an interesting candidate for the technique. I talked to a breast cancer researcher and he said, "That's a really clever idea. It sounds plausible. I can't do anything with it." And then explained the above reasoning.
This means that we tend to focus on treatments for currently untreatable cancers, and once we have something that is semi-OK, the rate of improvement goes way down. It doesn't go to zero, by any means, but the incentives shift in a way that is both perfectly logical and kind of perverse.