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Yesterday, physicians at the Mayo Clinic announced that Stacy Erholtz, a 49-year-old woman diagnosed with a fearsome cancer called multiple myeloma, had gone into remission. But don't buy into headlines you read that measles cure cancer. It's a bit more complicated than that.

For Erholtz, remission is a fantastic sign. Multiple myeloma is a nasty cancer, and most patients succumb after only four to five years even if their doctors catch it early. Stacy's doctors tried a battery of chemotherapy and stem cell treatments before turning to an experimental procedure involving the measles virus.

They injected her with an engineered measles virus that looks a lot like the measles vaccine. They gave her a lot—enough of the virus to vaccinate 10 million people. And it worked.

Despite the excited headlines, the doctors didn't exactly say that measles could cure cancer. Stephen Russell, a hematologist and lead author on the paper, told Reuters yesterday: "We have an enormous amount of work to do. We haven't discovered a cure for cancer here."

One big reason to be skeptical? The Mayo Clinic says that only one of the six people who received the treatment went into remission. The clinic tried curing four other multiple myeloma patients with measles virus, and none of them got better. One other patient responded but didn't go into remission. In a more pessimistic world, then, yesterday's headlines could have read "Measles Virus Has No Effect on Most Cancer Patients" instead of "Woman's Cancer Killed By Measles Virus."

However, while you should be wary of this one announcement, you should be excited about the potential for virotherapy: It really could be a major trend in the future of cancer medicine. Physicians have suspected that viruses could cure cancer since the mid-1950s, when some of their sickest patients suddenly got better after suffering from a viral infection. Scientists think that viruses may incite the body to fight back, and that while immune cells are at war with the virus, they attack cancerous tumors as well.

Scientists are now harnessing viruses to created these targeted cancer therapies. Viruses naturally infect cells in a very specific manner, and oncolytic virotherapy is a new field that involves reprogramming viruses to infect and kill only cancer cells, potentially avoiding the collateral damage inherent in chemotherapy.

The Mayo Clinic study is an exciting demonstration of a promising idea for battling cancers. It's also a study of only six patients, only one of whom went into remission. Cancer research requires a sample size larger than six patients, and probably a randomized, controlled study conducted on a mass scale. We're looking forward to seeing what virotherapy has to offer in the future. But don't go crazy with one person's recovery.

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