WHITFIELD: A woman who had an incurable cancer is now in remission after getting a huge dose of measles. It's an experimental new treatment that doctors at the Mayo Clinic tried. They gave the woman enough measles virus to vaccinate 10 million people and it ended up killing her cancer. Elizabeth Cohen has more on how this might affect the medical world.</s>COHEN: This is such an exciting study. Doctors are really excited about the research that's going on here. So this was done at the Mayo Clinic. There was a 50-year-old woman with a terrible kind of blood cancer called multiple myeloma. Doctors had tried everything and nothing worked. So they said, you know what, we need to try something experimental and boy was this experimental. What they did was they gave this woman massive amounts of the measles virus right into her blood stream and what they found was that the cancer went away. It was really pretty amazing. It did come back nine months later, but they were able to treat it with some pretty simple radiation and the cancer has remained out of her system. Now I do want to say one thing, which is that they tried this treatment in five other patients and it didn't work very well. But the success with this one woman definitely has made doctors think, could this possibly be a treatment for other people? So now they need to do more studies and try to find out. This isn't something that oncologists are going to start offering any day soon, but if they do more studies, they may find that this could be a treatment for some people with cancer -- Fred.</s>WHITFIELD: All right, there's much more to this study. We're going to talk to the woman who was at the center of this study when we come right back.
Measles Virus Treated Woman's Cancer