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Measles vaccine kills cancer: Why has this not been successful in humans until now?

  • I've just read that researchers at the Mayo Clinic have cured a person's blood cancer with a massive overdose of measles vaccine.  According to the article, this has been a well-known technique for curing cancer in rodents for a long time.  Why has it just now been effective on people?  http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/259155541.html

  • Answer:

    First, as says, this is the normal course of events.  You don't randomly throw things at humans with cancer just to see if, hey, maybe this works! You test on animals first.  And the vast, vast majority of the things you try in animals (even if they make terrific sense) don't work, and you spend years refining and repeating and retesting. This is especially true for things that have a high potential for harm.  Infecting a very sick person with an enormous dose of measles seems like a high-risk procedure, doesn't it? Thirdly, while this is the first (publicized) measles virus immune therapy, there are quite a few other trials using the same approach with different viruses. Fourth, this is not the first attempt at using this in people. http://Clinicaltrials.gov lists multiple clinical trials ongoing for the same approach (http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=measles+cancer+&Search=Search).  Fifth, if you read the full article, you'll note that the approach worked in one patient and failed in the second.  It's great that it may have worked, but the history of new cancer treatments is filled with exciting new treatments that seemed to work in one patient and failed in every other case.  I guarantee you that there are many ongoing clinical trials with a similar or higher success rate; not all of them have publicists as skilled as those at the Mayo, so you don't hear about them.  Or maybe the reporter writes the article in reverse, and puts the failed case in front, and you would write a furious question asking why these terrible scientists are using this awful, useless technique on sick people. Don't rely on the media for your cancer news.

Ian York at Quora Visit the source

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I don't know about you, but I generally like to have potentially dangerous substances tested out on mice and such before I go ahead and try it.

David Hu

It appears that the technology to make a concentrated-enough preparation of attenuated measles virus is quite new (2011) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21590404 Cancer cells exposed to measles virus develop resistance http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23612727, just as infections develop resistance to antibiotics. This is probably why it is necessary to give such a huge dose of measles virus for it to work on cancer.   The understanding of the ability of natural measles to kill cancer is actually much newer than the media are saying http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23586034 The ability to genetically engineer the attenuated viruses to target specific types of cancer cells better is certainly new. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21701532   Exciting stuff!  Kind of makes me think of early humans being preyed on by wolves, and then domesticating them as dogs to help them survive.

Peri Dwyer

I'm a professional scientific skeptic. And rule #1 for me is that researchers have "cured cancer" in rodents probably 100,000 times. A tiny percentage of those have ever made it into clinical trials and eventually cleared by the FDA for clinical use. There's data that only about 10% of cancer drugs that enter Phase 1 clinical trials eventually get FDA approval. That's a 90% failure rate (which says a lot about that old myth that the FDA is in Big Pharma's pocket). Rule #2 for me is that the quality of sources is important, and press releases rank near the bottom, just slightly ahead of NaturalNews as a source. http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/judging-quality-science-sources/. And as Ian York says elsewhere here, clinical trials matter, not case studies, animal studies, or press releases. Randomized double-blind (if it's ethical) clinical trials are the platinum standard of pharmaceutical research. Until you see a study published in a major journal with the results of 3000 patients (give or take 1500) in such a trial, then it is almost irrelevant. And don't rely on animal studies. No no no.

Michael Simpson

The historical success rate for oncolytic viruses was extremely mixed and usually didn't have a good result, it is only with our increased understanding of the immune system, of viruses, and cancers that it has become a viable technique. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, when their existence was first recognized, viruses have attracted considerable interest as possible agents of tumor destruction. Early case reports emphasized regression of cancers during naturally acquired virus infections, providing the basis for clinical trials where body fluids containing human or animal viruses were used to transmit infections to cancer patients. Most often the viruses were arrested by the host immune system and failed to impact tumor growth, but sometimes, in immunosuppressed patients, infection persisted and tumors regressed, although morbidity as a result of the infection of normal tissues was unacceptable. With the advent of rodent models and new methods for virus propagation, there were numerous attempts through the 1950s and 1960s to force the evolution of viruses with greater tumor specificity, but success was limited and many researchers abandoned the field. Technology employing reverse genetics later brought about a renewal of interest in virotherapy that allowed the generation of more potent, tumor-specific oncolytics. Here, examination of early oncolytic virotherapy before genetic engineering serves to highlight tremendous advances, yet also hints at ways to penetrate host immune defenses, a significant remaining challenge in modern virotherapy research http://www.nature.com/mt/journal/v15/n4/full/6300108a.html

Tom Musgrove

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