http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010607/sc/health_lymphoma_dc_1.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The battle against advanced
non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma may have an unlikely new weapon—the measles vaccine.
Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota,
said on Thursday mice injected with human cells containing the cancer went into
remission after receiving a derivative of the Edmonston-B strain of the
vaccine.
“If our laboratory findings translate to patients, then
our research may lead to another treatment for patients who have failed current
therapies for lymphoma and have exhausted their options for fighting the
disease,” said Mayo Clinic researcher Dr. Adele Fielding.
The study was published in the journal Blood, a
publication of the American Society of Hematology.
This year, an estimated 63,600 Americans will be diagnosed
with lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system, and about 27,600 patients will
die, the clinic said.
The standard treatment for lymphoma is chemotherapy alone
or in combination with radiation therapy. For patients who suffer a relapse,
high-dose chemotherapy is combined with a bone marrow transplant. But, Fielding
said, only about half or less of these advanced cases respond to treatment.
The Mayo Clinic has received approval from the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration (news - web sites) to test the vaccine on patients with
advanced non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma who have failed to respond to the conventional
treatment, Fielding said.
She said the initial study will test the safety of the
vaccine and will be limited to eight patients, who will receive the same dose
as that used in a standard measles vaccination. The vaccine will be injected
directly into their tumors, Fielding said.
“The main aim of this study is to make sure it is safe,”
she said. “In the mice, the dose that
was required to make the tumors regress was considerably higher than the dose
of the virus just in the vaccine.”
The Edmonston-B strain of the vaccine has been used
worldwide for more than 30 years and Fielding said it is “extremely unlikely” patients
would be harmed by the treatment.
The vaccine may cause tumors to shrink because some of the
proteins expressed when the measles virus is replicating are toxic to the tumor
cells, she said.
Another explanation could be that the virus causes the
tumor cells to group together and form cells with lots of nuclei all in one and
these subsequently die, Fielding said.
A third possible explanation is that the measles virus
makes the tumor cells more visible to the patient’s immune system, which then can
attack the cancer, she said. One of the reasons that cancers can grow is they
manage to evade detection by the patient’s immune system.
Fielding said she hopes to complete the pilot study within
a year.
“Following on from this Phase I study we will probably try increasing
the dose,” she said. “We have some indication we will probably need to use more
than the dose that’s in one vial of vaccine.”
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