Measles Vaccine May Offer Novel Treatment Approach.(Brief Article)

2001 JUN 27 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) --

The virus strain used worldwide for more than 30 years to produce the measles vaccine may be effective for another purpose: fighting lymphoma, a group of cancers that originate in the lymphatic system.

Scientists with Mayo Clinic's molecular medicine program have found that the measles vaccine virus caused remission of lymphoma in mice injected with human cells containing the cancer. The findings from the study were published in the June 15, 2001, issue of Blood, the journal of the American Society of Hematology.

This laboratory study is thought to be the first research conducted by any medical research institution to demonstrate the destructive effects of the measles vaccine virus on lymphoma cells. It is one of several research studies underway at Mayo Clinic to investigate the effects of the measles vaccine virus on cancer.

Adele Fielding, MD, PhD, lead researcher on the newly-published Mayo Clinic study, describes the findings as an early step in potentially developing the measles vaccine virus into a treatment for patients with advanced lymphomas.

"Our research involved the use of derivatives of the Edmonston-B strain of the measles vaccine to study its effects on both aggressive and slow-growing B-cell lymphoma," says Fielding. "We found that injecting the vaccine strain of the virus into the tumor caused remission of the large, established human B-cell lymphoma in laboratory mice with the cancer. Intravenous administration of the vaccine strain also resulted ...