Media outlets, both traditional and social, are awash with the news that researchers in the US have apparently cured cancer with the measles virus – for example, the Washington Post, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph and (with a much more measured headline) Reuters.

But while the story is dramatic – a 49-year old US woman’s myeloma blood cancer seems to have completely disappeared following treatment – the actual science is a lot more complex than simply injecting her with an armful of measles. A number of the stories implied that the woman had been treated with an extremely high dose of the regular measles vaccine, but we need to be absolutely clear here:

This treatment did not involve a standard measles vaccine or virus – the researchers used a genetically modified virus, and there’s no evidence that the regular measles or MMR jab can cure, prevent or cause any type of cancer.

In fact, we’ve been here before – the approach is similar (although different in certain key respects) to the modified HIV-type virus used to successfully treat a young girl with leukaemia. Overblown headlines about her treatment also flew round the social media world before the scientific truth had got its boots on.

It’s also similar in that this is just one single success story from a very early stage trial, and a lot more work needs to be done to prove that it could be a safe and effective treatment for cancer.

What is this virus treatment?

The researchers at the Mayo Clinic in the US, led by Dr Stephen Russell, are using an approach called ‘oncolytic virus therapy’, which is generating a lot of excitement in the cancer research community around the world. In fact, we’ve written about some of our work in this area a coupleof times already.

Briefly, it involves treating patients with viruses that have been genetically engineered to specifically infect cancer cells, rather than causing the particular illness that they usually bring. When injected into the body, the viruses seek out and destroy the tumour cells, multiplying inside them to create even more cancer-killing viruses. At least, that’s the theory.

To date, researchers have created oncolytic viruses from a number of different types of modified virus, including the herpes virus (which causes cold sores), poxvirus (chickenpox and related diseases) and adenovirus (common cold). But while tests in cancer cells grown in the lab and animals have been remarkably successful, this promise unfortunately hasn’t yet translated into success in clinical trials with actual cancer patients.