# Stephen J. Russell

Source: https://onco.cc/people/stephen-russell/  
OnCo record `stephen-russell` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Stephen Russell built the engineered measles viruses used against cancer and reported the case in which one intravenous dose put a patient's myeloma into complete remission.

## Summary

Stephen Russell works in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and his recent papers also carry an affiliation to Vyriad, the Rochester company developing oncolytic viruses. His programme built MV-NIS, a measles virus engineered to kill myeloma plasma cells and to carry the sodium iodide symporter gene so that virus replication can be imaged non-invasively with radioiodine.

In 2014 he reported two measles-seronegative patients with drug-refractory myeloma given a single intravenous infusion of 10^11 infectious units of MV-NIS. Both responded and one had a durable complete remission at all disease sites, with imaging confirming virus replication inside the tumours. It remains the most cited demonstration that intravenous oncolytic virotherapy can work, and the clearest illustration of why it usually cannot: the patients were selected for having no pre-existing measles antibodies, which excludes nearly everyone.

With Kah-Whye Peng and John Bell he wrote the 2012 Nature Biotechnology review that set the field's agenda, and with Eleanor Kelly the 2007 history of oncolytic viruses from the first case reports to genetic engineering. He read and commented on the 2024 Croatian self-experimentation case report before publication, which the authors acknowledge.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-09-25
- Tags: oncolytic-virus; immunotherapy; myeloma
- Role: Molecular medicine researcher, Mayo Clinic, Rochester; also affiliated with Vyriad, Rochester
- Specialisms: Oncolytic virotherapy; Engineered measles virus; Myeloma; Gene and virus manufacturing

## Sources

- ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0799-6432
- PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Russell%20SJ%5BAuthor%5D%20oncolytic%20OR%20measles
- Mayo Clinic research faculty: https://www.mayo.edu/research/faculty

## Connected records

- cancers: [Multiple myeloma](https://onco.cc/cancers/multiple-myeloma/)
- technologies: [Oncolytic viruses](https://onco.cc/technologies/oncolytic-virus/)
- institutions: [Mayo Clinic](https://onco.cc/institutions/mayo-clinic/)
- people: [Evanthia Galanis](https://onco.cc/people/evanthia-galanis/), [John C. Bell](https://onco.cc/people/john-bell/)
- key papers: [Kelly and Russell 2007: a century of trying to treat cancer with viruses, and why it kept stopping](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-kelly-russell-oncolytic-history-moltherapy-2007/), [Russell 2014: a measles virus given into the vein put one patient's myeloma into complete remission](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-russell-mv-nis-myeloma-mayo-2014/), [Russell, Peng and Bell 2012: the field states its own problems](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-russell-peng-bell-oncolytic-virotherapy-natbiotech-2012/)

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