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Two people with drug-resistant myeloma were given an enormous dose of engineered measles virus into a vein; both responded and one went into a lasting complete remission.
MV-NIS is an engineered measles virus that is selectively destructive to myeloma plasma cells and carries the sodium iodide symporter gene, so that where the virus is replicating can be imaged non-invasively with radioiodine. Two measles-seronegative patients with relapsing, drug-refractory myeloma and multiple glucose-avid plasmacytomas were given a single intravenous infusion of 10^11 tissue culture infectious doses.
Both responded, with reduction in M protein and resolution of bone marrow plasmacytosis, and one had a durable complete remission at all disease sites. Symporter-mediated radioiodine uptake in virus-infected plasmacytomas documented that the virus had reached and was replicating in the tumours. Toxicities resolved within the first week.
The two patients were selected for being measles-seronegative, which almost nobody is, and the dose is at the edge of what can be manufactured. That is the paper's real content: proof that intravenous oncolytic virotherapy can work, and a demonstration of exactly why it usually cannot.
This is the case most often cited to argue that oncolytic viruses can cure. It should be cited with its conditions: two patients, both chosen because they had no pre-existing measles antibodies, and a dose so large that manufacturing it is itself a research problem. It proves the biology is real and simultaneously explains why the approach has not generalised.
Shares Stephen J. Russell, Oncolytic viruses.
Shares Stephen J. Russell, Oncolytic viruses.
Shares Stephen J. Russell, Oncolytic viruses.
Shares Evanthia Galanis, Stephen J. Russell, Multiple myeloma.