A woman with an incurable cancer is now in remission, thanks, doctors say, to a highly concentrated dose of the measles virus.

For 10 years, Stacy Erholtz, 49, battledmultiple myeloma, a deadly cancer of the blood.

Doctors at the Mayo Clinic say she had received every type of chemotherapy drug available for her cancer and had undergone two stem cell transplants, only to relapse time and again.

Then researchers gave her and five other multiple myeloma patients a dose of a highly concentrated, lab-engineered measles virus similar to the measles vaccine.

In fact, the dose Erholtz received contained enough of the virus to vaccinate approximately 100 million people.

The idea here is that a virus can be trained to specifically damage a cancer and to leave other tissues in the body unharmed, said the lead study author, Dr. Stephen Russell.

Its a concept known as virotherapy and its been done before.

Mayo Clinic scientists say thousands of cancer patients have been treated with viruses but this is the first case of a patient with a cancer that had spread throughout the body going into remission.

Erholtz was cancer-free for nine months.

I think we succeeded because we pushed the dose higher than others have pushed it, Russell said. And I think that is critical. The amount of virus thats in the bloodstream really is the driver of how much gets into the tumors.

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Researchers: Dose of measles puts womans cancer into remission