Speaker 1: I thought I knew what I needed to know about
Speaker 1: what happens when you get measles. You get a fever
Speaker 1: and a rash. Maybe you get very sick. If you're
Speaker 1: really unlucky, you die. But chances are you get measles,
Speaker 1: you get better, and that's the end of it as
Speaker 1: it happens.
Speaker 2: I was wrong.
Speaker 1: I did not know what I needed to know about measles,
Speaker 1: because a recent discovery has blown open our whole idea
Speaker 1: of what the measles virus does to our bodies.
Speaker 3: The world thought that measles was done being discovered, and
Speaker 3: then boom, all of a sudden, there's this new idea
Speaker 3: of something that really had massive, massive consequences on humans
Speaker 3: that we didn't even realize.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is Incubation, a show about viruses.
Speaker 1: Today on the show, how measles attacks your immune system
Speaker 1: and how researchers are trying to use measles to cure cancer.
Speaker 1: My guest for the first half of today's show is
Speaker 1: Michael Minna. He's an epidemiologist slash immunologist slash physician, and
Speaker 1: he's kind of a measles superfan. He did a lot
Speaker 1: of work we'll talk about today while he was a
Speaker 1: professor at Harvard. He's now chief scientific officer at a
Speaker 1: company called Emed. We started by talking about a surprising
Speaker 1: thing that happened after the measles vaccine was introduced in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties. As more and more kids were vaccinated
Speaker 1: against measles, the rate at which kids were dying of
Speaker 1: infectious disease went down way more than anybody expected. It
Speaker 1: went down so much that it couldn't be explained by
Speaker 1: measles alone.
Speaker 3: After the vaccine was introduced, we saw market reductions in
Speaker 3: childhood mortality overall following the vaccine, which drove a a
Speaker 3: lot of questions. Why did that happen? Is it the
Speaker 3: vaccine actually acting directly to somehow prevent other infections, or
Speaker 3: is there something else at play?
Speaker 1: Even if zero people died of measles, Even if zero
Speaker 1: children died of measles, you wouldn't get that large of
Speaker 1: a reduction immortality, Right, some weird thing is going.
Speaker 4: On, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: Weird good thing, weird usually.
Speaker 3: That's right, A very weird good thing was going on.
Speaker 1: So now we have this interesting kind of happy mystery
Speaker 1: in a way, Why are so few children dying of
Speaker 1: infectious disease after the rollout of the measles vaccine. What
Speaker 1: do you do to try and figure out what's going on?
Speaker 3: We said, well, maybe it's because measles had detrimental effects
Speaker 3: on somebody's immune memory that might be putting them at
Speaker 3: risk for other stuff, other infections, And so what we
Speaker 3: did was we said, well, if that's the case, then
Speaker 3: if we look at a lot of data, we map
Speaker 3: the numbers of cases of measles to the numbers of
Speaker 3: deaths from other things besides measles from year to year.
Speaker 3: And what we found was profoundly predictive. Is if you
Speaker 3: asked what were the number of measles cases in nineteen
Speaker 3: forty nine and what were the numbers of deaths from
Speaker 3: non measles infections from nineteen forty nine, nineteen fifty and
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty one. When you occrued all three years, it
Speaker 3: became extraordinarily predictive of how many children would die over
Speaker 3: the next three years of non measles infectious related deaths.
Speaker 1: So, just to be clear, what you found is that
Speaker 1: when there's a measle's outbreak in one year, the rate
Speaker 1: at which kids died from other infectious diseases went up
Speaker 1: in the next few years.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right.
Speaker 1: So you used in your answer just there this phrase
Speaker 1: that I just want to spend a moment on immune memory.
Speaker 1: What is immune memory.
Speaker 3: Immune memory is very similar to our regular memory. All
Speaker 3: of our body is memories, whether it be muscle memory,
Speaker 3: brain memory, or immune memory is stored in cells. The
Speaker 3: way that immune memory works is when you bump up
Speaker 3: against a pathogen, as let's say, a virus like measles
Speaker 3: or coronavirus, whatever it might be, your body actually sees it,
Speaker 3: it recognizes that virus, it learns from it, and it
Speaker 3: actually remembers it in B cells and T cells and
Speaker 3: plasma cells. And that's how our immune system works in
Speaker 3: terms of developing immune memory and utilizing it to combat
Speaker 3: infections that we see in the future.
Speaker 1: Is what you're finding that in some way measles is
Speaker 1: attacking the kid's immune memory. Is that the hypothesis that follows.
Speaker 3: That's exactly the hypothesis that follows. For example, if if
Speaker 3: a six year old got measles, then maybe that measles
Speaker 3: infection could destroy some of the immune memory the defenses
Speaker 3: that that child gained over the last six years and therefore,
Speaker 3: when they are seven or eight years old, are actually
Speaker 3: more vulnerable than they otherwise would have been to those
Speaker 3: infections that they gained the immunity to when they were
Speaker 3: two or three.
Speaker 1: So, okay, you have this hypothesis, how do you test it?
Speaker 1: How do you investigate what's really going on?
Speaker 3: There's a long, rich history of how to predict where
Speaker 3: measles is going to go next. It's actually famous for
Speaker 3: how predictive it is because it is so infectious that
Speaker 3: you just need to know how many people are vaccinated
Speaker 3: in a community, and if there's any measles anywhere in
Speaker 3: the region, you can expect that pretty soon at below
Speaker 3: certain levels, there's going to be an outbreak.
Speaker 1: Below certain levels of vaccination.
Speaker 3: That's right, and that's why measles is considered the canary
Speaker 3: and the coal mine for vaccine rates. Literally the thing
Speaker 3: that pops up on the radar when you say who's
Speaker 3: what communities are having trouble vaccinating their population, and boom,
Speaker 3: if you see measles, you know they're having trouble vaccinating
Speaker 3: their populations. And so what we can do is we
Speaker 3: can leverage everything we know about measles epidemiology to help
Speaker 3: identify where might outbreaks happen, And that's exactly what Rick
Speaker 3: de Swart and his team did. They are in the Netherlands.
Speaker 3: He's at Erasmus which is in Rotterdam, and so he
Speaker 3: was able to say, hey, right in our backyard, there's
Speaker 3: a community that for religious reasons, they chose not to
Speaker 3: vaccinate their children against measles. So they said, well, if
Speaker 3: you're not going to get a vaccine, would you be
Speaker 3: interested or willing to have us just draw a little
Speaker 3: sample of blood from your kids today and should measles
Speaker 3: catch up to them in the future, could we come
Speaker 3: back and draw another sample of blood.
Speaker 1: You have the before measles blood samples, and you have
Speaker 1: from the same children the after measles blood samples. We
Speaker 1: have everything ready to go. What happened there was a.
Speaker 3: Big outbreak, and almost immediately we start seeing that we
Speaker 3: can measure all of these antibodies in the blood samples.
Speaker 3: And then when we actually look at the blood samples
Speaker 3: from right before the kids got measles to those same
Speaker 3: kids blood samples that they collected after, we saw market
Speaker 3: reductions not just in a couple antibodies, but some kids
Speaker 3: lost eighty percent of all of the diversity of their
Speaker 3: antibodies that existed in that blood sample before they got measles,
Speaker 3: and we compared it. We said, well, maybe that's normal.
Speaker 3: So we looked at kids who had gotten vaccinated for measles.
Speaker 3: We look the kids who just had no infections, and
Speaker 3: what we saw was the average person with from any
Speaker 3: two time points, there'd be like five percent difference in
Speaker 3: their overall antibody repertoire. But the measles kids, the kids
Speaker 3: who got measles lost anywhere from twenty percent to eighty
Speaker 3: percent of their whole immunological memory pool. This is the
Speaker 3: whole lifetime of immune memory protection that they've spent years
Speaker 3: building up and building up, just poof wiped away because
Speaker 3: of this measles infection and these kids. What that means
Speaker 3: is now, across millions and millions of kids who were
Speaker 3: before the vaccines, almost every child got measles. And so
Speaker 3: at that scale, when you have so many people getting
Speaker 3: measles and this effect happening, which we call immunological amnesia,
Speaker 3: essentially they forgot their body, forgot because of the infection
Speaker 3: the immune memories that they formed before the infection. What
Speaker 3: that means is that you have all of these kids
Speaker 3: that are more susceptible to other infectious diseases. So most
Speaker 3: most kids would survive. But it turned out that of
Speaker 3: those kids who did die from other things, about half
Speaker 3: of those deaths could be attributed to the immune amnesia
Speaker 3: associated with measles.
Speaker 1: Is there something particularly insidious if that happens at a
Speaker 1: population level? If you imagine a group of people in
Speaker 1: the absence of a vaccine entirely, where it's like, not
Speaker 1: only is each kid more vulnerable, but because all the
Speaker 1: other kids are more vulnerable, everybody is more vulnerable. Is
Speaker 1: there something like that that happens?
Speaker 3: I am so happy you asked that question.
Speaker 1: You're welcome.
Speaker 3: So yes, it is. It's a much much harder thing
Speaker 3: to measure.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's sort of like the reverse of herd
Speaker 1: immunity in some weird broad spectrum way, right.
Speaker 3: So what's so interesting that you bring that up? Because
Speaker 3: before my measles work, I was working on influenza and
Speaker 3: its impacts on other bacterial infections, And during my PhD,
Speaker 3: I coined a term called generalized herd effects, and I
Speaker 3: explicitly didn't call it herd immuni because maybe it's not
Speaker 3: going to reduce things but maybe you could exacerbate things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how about herd vulnerability? I want the opposite. What's
Speaker 1: the opposite of herding units?
Speaker 3: That's exactly. Herd vulnerability is a great term, and so
Speaker 3: the idea there as well. If you have a pathogen
Speaker 3: that's impacting your susceptibility to a lot of other pathogens,
Speaker 3: you could, you know, create a herd vulnerability because of
Speaker 3: infections of that initial pathogen. And on the contrary, if
Speaker 3: you figure out a vaccine against that initial pathogen, like
Speaker 3: the measles vaccine, you create massive benefits in getting rid
Speaker 3: of that herd vulnerability.
Speaker 1: So what's going on on a cellular level?
Speaker 3: As far as we know, measles is unique in its class.
Speaker 3: It's actually it's an amazing story. So if you give
Speaker 3: me forty seconds to describe it, I.
Speaker 1: Will, Oh, go, you got a minute if you need it.
Speaker 3: So, every virus has a receptor that it binds to
Speaker 3: and needs to latch onto on a cell. For measles,
Speaker 3: it's this molecule that's called CD one fifty, or it's
Speaker 3: called SLAM. SLAM stands for a signaling of Lymphocyte activation molecule,
Speaker 3: and it's when somebody gets a measles infection. The virus
Speaker 3: comes into somebody's lungs and we have these cool dendritic cells.
Speaker 3: And dendritic cells are like these cells of big arms,
Speaker 3: and they go out and reach pathogens that they that
Speaker 3: they know shouldn't be there, and they capture them and
Speaker 3: bring them in and then they shuttle them into the
Speaker 3: lymphoid system, which is where all of our immune cells are.
Speaker 3: And so normally what would happen is the dendritic cells
Speaker 3: would say, hey, immune system, you know, here's a pathogen,
Speaker 3: take it and develop immune memory against it, and so
Speaker 3: it literally hands it off to B cells and T cells.
Speaker 3: In this case, when the dendritic cell does exactly that
Speaker 3: same process, it hands off Measles virus to B cells
Speaker 3: and T cells. And this is a big mistake because
Speaker 3: now you have a virus that, instead of being handed
Speaker 3: off to a B and T cell and having that
Speaker 3: B and T cell you know, ingested and learn from it,
Speaker 3: the measles flips on its receptor utilization and grabs City
Speaker 3: one fifty or slam these molecules on the outside of
Speaker 3: the B cells and the T cells, and it actually
Speaker 3: invades them like a trojan horse.
Speaker 1: Aha. So It's like a like a trick, right, Like
Speaker 1: measles is there acting like a normal virus until it
Speaker 1: gets to the B cells in the T cells in
Speaker 1: the immune system. And normally the B cells in the
Speaker 1: T cells would destroy measles, would destroy the virus. But
Speaker 1: in that case, this doesn't happen, right, So what does happen?
Speaker 4: Now?
Speaker 3: It's in the cushy lymphoid system and it's just full
Speaker 3: of food and it just replicates like crazy inside the
Speaker 3: immune system, all the while sell by cell destroying the
Speaker 3: valuable immune memory is stored inside each of those that
Speaker 3: it's destroying.
Speaker 1: That is very compelling that it's like a virological horror
Speaker 1: movie inside your body.
Speaker 3: It absolutely is. And what we see when we see
Speaker 3: the prototypic measles rash, which is like dots all over
Speaker 3: a child's body, red dots, it is truly the tip
Speaker 3: of the iceberg in terms of where the damage is
Speaker 3: being done. The real damage inside a child is much
Speaker 3: much deeper and much much more profound in terms of,
Speaker 3: you know, destroying a huge, huge population of very important
Speaker 3: cells inside of our body.
Speaker 1: So if you sort of step back and think about
Speaker 1: this idea that measles not only gives you measles but
Speaker 1: makes you vulnerable to lots of other infectious diseases. Does
Speaker 1: it make you think differently about virus? Is about the
Speaker 1: immune system? Like where do you land?
Speaker 3: Measles brings together for me mathematics, biology, ecology and evolution
Speaker 3: and vaccinology, and I love bringing those pieces together, and
Speaker 3: it gives you a very deep appreciation for the delicate
Speaker 3: balance we have between infectious diseases, immunity, cancer, and autoimmune disease,
Speaker 3: and how those all interplay with each other. You know,
Speaker 3: the world thought that measles was done being discovered, and
Speaker 3: then boom, all of a sudden, there's this new idea
Speaker 3: of something that really had massive, massive consequences on humans
Speaker 3: that we didn't even realize. And so it drives this
Speaker 3: renewed excitement around measles vaccination and the importance of it.
Speaker 3: It's not just a cool finding. It hopefully helps us
Speaker 3: move further and further towards eradication of the virus altogether.
Speaker 1: It was great to talk with you. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for your time.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: It was a lot of fun. Michael Minna is Chief
Speaker 1: Science Officer at EMED Digital Healthcare. He was previously a
Speaker 1: professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. When we
Speaker 1: come back using measles to fight cancer, going back all
Speaker 1: the way to the eighteen hundreds, which was before anybody
Speaker 1: even knew what a virus really was, there have been
Speaker 1: occasional reports of cancer patients who get some kind of
Speaker 1: viral infection and then go into remission from cancer, and
Speaker 1: at a certain level this makes sense. Viruses are highly
Speaker 1: evolved to enter and destroy cells. Normally we think of
Speaker 1: this as a bad thing, but if a virus is
Speaker 1: entering and destroying cancer cells, this inter a cell and
Speaker 1: destroy it property might be a very good thing. By
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, researchers were actively trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how to use viruses to treat cancer. But then new
Speaker 1: kinds of cancer drugs were discovered, basically chemotherapy, and researchers
Speaker 1: got less interested in that virus cancer link. My guest
Speaker 1: for this half of the show is Stephen Russell. Stephen
Speaker 1: has spent his career trying to use viruses to cure cancer,
Speaker 1: and as you'll hear, he and other researchers in the
Speaker 1: field have made real progress. When Stephen was starting his
Speaker 1: career in the nineteen eighties, he was interested in using
Speaker 1: retroviruses as possible cancer treatments. Then he told me he
Speaker 1: turned his attention to measles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, measles became the next love.
Speaker 1: You fell in love with measles? Yeah, of course, why'd
Speaker 1: you fall in love with measles?
Speaker 2: Well? All viruses are quite beautiful, I have to say,
Speaker 2: and the life cycles are extraordinarily elegant. But measles I
Speaker 2: could do things with. I knew that there was a
Speaker 2: very remarkable case of a boy with a retro orbital
Speaker 2: Burkitt lymphoma, a very aggressive lymphoma that was sort of
Speaker 2: bulging his eye out, And he went to a clinic
Speaker 2: and was told, well, come back in a couple of
Speaker 2: weeks and we'll start the therapy. And he came back
Speaker 2: in a couple of weeks and the tumor had just resolved.
Speaker 2: But in the meantime he'd had a severe measles infection. Huh,
Speaker 2: And so it looked like it was pretty certain that
Speaker 2: the measles infection had driven this response.
Speaker 1: That he had Burko lymphoma also caused by a virus. Right,
Speaker 1: the first tumor we knew was caused by a virus
Speaker 1: Epstein by yeah, so go on, I apologize.
Speaker 2: So anyway, I looking at measles, it seemed to tick
Speaker 2: a lot of boxes. But there was this whole history
Speaker 2: of the development of a vaccine strain of measles, and
Speaker 2: measles had been the vaccine had been created by taking
Speaker 2: a virus from the throat of a patient with measles.
Speaker 2: He was an eleven year old boy at the time,
Speaker 2: David Edmonstone in nineteen fifty four, and then growing that
Speaker 2: virus on cancer cells in tissue culture, and the virus
Speaker 2: had quired the ability to propagate efficiently in cancer cells,
Speaker 2: but it lost the ability to cause measles.
Speaker 1: And wait, I just just to be clear, this was
Speaker 1: just they weren't trying when they were doing this to
Speaker 1: fight cancer. They were just trying to develop a measles vaccine.
Speaker 1: They were just saying, we're going to grow this measles
Speaker 1: in culture over time and make it be attenuator, make
Speaker 1: it be weaker. And it adapted in such a way
Speaker 1: that it preferred to infect tumor cells and not to
Speaker 1: infect non tumor.
Speaker 2: Cells because of the way they adapted it. Because remember
Speaker 2: that the cells that they were growing in the lab
Speaker 2: that they could put the measles virus on were basically
Speaker 2: cancer cells.
Speaker 1: And is that just because those are easy cells to grow?
Speaker 1: Because they liked to propagate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's very, very difficult to grow non cancerous cells. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like the problem with cancer, right, it just loves
Speaker 1: to divide.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So they put this virus on the cells
Speaker 2: in culture, and the virus had actually adapted and it
Speaker 2: had learned to use a receptor that is more abundant
Speaker 2: on cancer cells than on normal cells, and it was
Speaker 2: losing all sorts of things that it needed in order
Speaker 2: to cause disease because it didn't need them to be
Speaker 2: able to propagate the cancer cells. So it spontaneously attenuated
Speaker 2: through a lot of mutations that arose in the viral genome.
Speaker 2: And so there it was and had been given to
Speaker 2: billions of people, and it looked like it was fairly
Speaker 2: well adapted to test in human studies against cancer.
Speaker 1: The measles virus used in the vaccine didn't make people sick,
Speaker 1: and it tended to attack cancer cells. So Stephen started
Speaker 1: using that form of the virus in studies to see
Speaker 1: if measles could treat cancer. Eventually, he landed on a
Speaker 1: kind of cancer called multiple myeloma that can take hold
Speaker 1: in the bone marrow and suppress the immune system. And
Speaker 1: there was one multiple myeloma patient in particular who had
Speaker 1: a huge effect on how Stephen thought about using measles
Speaker 1: to fight cancer. The patient's name was Stacy.
Speaker 2: Rholtz, So Stacy. She had multiple myeloma. She had been
Speaker 2: on treatment for ten years, on and off, but probably
Speaker 2: more on and off treatment for the first ten years
Speaker 2: of her diagnosis, because every time she stopped the treatment,
Speaker 2: or even if she continued on it, the disease would
Speaker 2: come back, and then she needs switch to something else.
Speaker 2: She had a large tumor on her forehead that was
Speaker 2: destroying the underlying bone and compressing her brain. She had
Speaker 2: four other solid tumors, and then her bone marrow was
Speaker 2: diffusely infiltrated with myeloma and it was moving fast, and
Speaker 2: she was out of treatment options at the time. I mean,
Speaker 2: there was nothing.
Speaker 1: She was going to die soon.
Speaker 2: She was going to die, yeah, and she had three
Speaker 2: children still at school and everything to play for. She
Speaker 2: was fifty years old at the time. We'd moved up
Speaker 2: through every dose level that FDA had negotiated with us,
Speaker 2: based on a starting dose level of a million, we'd
Speaker 2: gone up to just tenfold short of a billion.
Speaker 1: Like, how much did she get compared to how much
Speaker 1: somebody gets when they get the measles vaxing.
Speaker 2: It's about ten million doses of vaccine.
Speaker 1: Okay for this one person, So she's getting quite a lot.
Speaker 1: And what happens.
Speaker 2: Well as with other patients, she had a reaction to
Speaker 2: the infusion of virus. So she got the virus infused.
Speaker 2: She felt fine for a couple of hours, and then
Speaker 2: she started shivering and shaking and her temperature rose and
Speaker 2: she felt pretty unwell overnight, but by the following morning
Speaker 2: it had settled down.
Speaker 1: And is that essentially like a response to a massive infection.
Speaker 1: She's essentially has this massive infection.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's similar to that, although it wasn't causing measles
Speaker 2: in her so it was it was more the body
Speaker 2: reacting to the foreign stuff in the blood and a
Speaker 2: very kind of rapid reaction. That settled down and then
Speaker 2: she left hospital, went home and after a few days
Speaker 2: she started noticing that the tumor on her forehead she
Speaker 2: and her family had named it Evan, and this tumor Evan,
Speaker 2: started to shrink and actually melted away. And you know,
Speaker 2: we conducted thorough evaluates on her intervals thereafter and we
Speaker 2: were staggered to see that she went into a complete
Speaker 2: disease remission. She felt fantastic. You know. We thought at
Speaker 2: the time, Okay, we've got it. This is the way
Speaker 2: to cure multiple myeloma. And so we gave it to
Speaker 2: a lot of other multiple myeloma patients and it didn't
Speaker 2: work nearly so well. There were some partial responses, but
Speaker 2: there was really nothing as dramatic as Stacy. So we
Speaker 2: studied Stacy pretty intensively to try and understand what was
Speaker 2: special about her because that would be the key to
Speaker 2: the success of virotherapy. I mean, what we knew from
Speaker 2: Stacy as Wow, this can actually happen. You can give
Speaker 2: a virus systemically nothing else, and you can get a
Speaker 2: dramatic resolution of tumor at all sites. So the studies
Speaker 2: that we did on Stacy showed that number one, she
Speaker 2: had no anti measles antibody detectable. She had, however, been
Speaker 2: vaccinated as a child and then she had lost her
Speaker 2: immunity and she'd been revaccinated after her first stem cell transplant.
Speaker 2: The immunity had come back, and she'd lost it again
Speaker 2: after the second stem cell transplant. Huh, So she had
Speaker 2: no antibodies to block the virus from getting to the target.
Speaker 1: So basically her immune system was the same as the
Speaker 1: immune system of a person who has never had measles
Speaker 1: and not been vaccinated for measles.
Speaker 2: Not quite, because we looked at her tea cells, the
Speaker 2: cells that come into the tumor and attack the virus
Speaker 2: infected cells, and she had a very high level of
Speaker 2: anti measles tea cells.
Speaker 1: As it turned out, this was a perfect combination. Stacy
Speaker 1: didn't have any antibodies, so the measles virus was free
Speaker 1: to go into her body and infect her tumor cells.
Speaker 1: But she did have anti measles T cells, so once
Speaker 1: the measles infected the tumor cells, those T cells could
Speaker 1: attack her tumor cells. So now she had both the
Speaker 1: measles virus and her own T cells attacking and destroying
Speaker 1: the tumor. Stephen told me he learned a lot from
Speaker 1: Stacy's case and it helped him figure out how to
Speaker 1: move forward with his research.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there are two pathways that we took. One
Speaker 2: was to switch to a different virus that people do
Speaker 2: not have prior exposure to, and so we started working
Speaker 2: with the sicular stomatitis virus VSV, which causes naturally a
Speaker 2: blistering illness in cattle. Uh huh.
Speaker 1: So that's that's one way to get around the immunity
Speaker 1: to measles problem. Right, You're using a virus that most
Speaker 1: people don't get and are therefore not immune to.
Speaker 2: Is that going it's going, it's going well. Where you know,
Speaker 2: it's not in every cancer that we see anything, but
Speaker 2: the results that we have at the moment are looking
Speaker 2: very promising in certain indications. The other approach we took
Speaker 2: was to stealth measles virus so that it would still
Speaker 2: be measles virus. It would still be that vaccine strain,
Speaker 2: but it would have a new coat huh, that was
Speaker 2: no longer recognizable by circulating antibodies. And so we would
Speaker 2: in that situation we would have a virus we could
Speaker 2: give systemically that would penetrate the tumor and that would
Speaker 2: then be subject to attack by these T cells that
Speaker 2: exist in people who've been measles immunized. Well, does it
Speaker 2: work in mice?
Speaker 1: Okay, it's a start.
Speaker 2: We haven't taken that one into human clinical tests.
Speaker 1: Yet, let's talk for a minute about using viruses to
Speaker 1: treat cancer more broadly. Right, people have been trying other
Speaker 1: viruses to treat other cancers. What's the state of the
Speaker 1: field more generally?
Speaker 2: There has been incremental progress and there are viruses that
Speaker 2: are looking very promising in brain cancer injected into the brain,
Speaker 2: tumor in bladder cancer instilled into the bladder. And I
Speaker 2: think many ongoing programs which show great promise. So I'm
Speaker 2: still a complete believer in the capability of viruses to
Speaker 2: really bring a transformation in the approach to cancer therapy.
Speaker 2: I feel like it's coming soon, but not everybody agrees
Speaker 2: with me.
Speaker 1: I appreciate your time so much. It was great to tell.
Speaker 2: With you, great talking with you too. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Stephen Russell founded the Department of Molecular Medicine at the
Speaker 1: Mayo Clinic. He is currently the CEO of Viriad, a
Speaker 1: company that is trying to use viruses to treat cancer.
Speaker 1: One last thing, Stephen told me that he's still in
Speaker 1: touch with Stacy Airholtz, the patient who had multiple myeloma
Speaker 1: and went into complete remission after being treated with measles.
Speaker 2: Stacy A. Holtz is you know, a guiding light for me.
Speaker 2: I'm friends with her, I'm in contact with her on
Speaker 2: a regular basis, and she's got grandkids. She's having a
Speaker 2: happy life. She's a very positive woman.
Speaker 1: Thanks to both of our guests today, Michael Minna and
Speaker 1: Stephen Russell. Next week on the show, I talked to
Speaker 1: a scientist who discovered an entirely new kind of virus,
Speaker 1: and it turns out this virus is everywhere.
Speaker 4: Boiling Springs Lake, deep Sea Sediment's Harrian air sample, monkey feces,
Speaker 4: dragonfly guts, soil, just outside the lab at Portland State University,
Speaker 4: basically anywhere that we have looked, we found these Cruci viruses.
Speaker 1: Incubation is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Ruby
Speaker 1: Studio at iHeartMedia. It's produced by Kate Ferby and Brittany Cronin.
Speaker 1: The show is edited by Lacy Roberts. It's mastered by
Speaker 1: Sarah Bruguer, fact checking by Joseph Fridman. Our executive producers
Speaker 1: are Lacey Roberts and Matt Romano. I'm Jacob Goldstein. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.