WASHINGTON The battle against advanced non-Hodgkin's lymphoma may have an unlikely new weapon -- the measles vaccine.

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said mice injected with human cells containing the cancer went into remission after receiving a derivative of the Edmonston-B strain of the vaccine, Reuters reported on Thursday.

"If our laboratory findings translate to patients, then our research may lead to another treatment for patients who have failed current therapies for lymphoma and have exhausted their options for fighting the disease," said Mayo Clinic researcher Dr. Adele Fielding.

The study was published in the journal ***Blood***, a publication of the American Society of Hematology.

This year, an estimated 63,600 Americans will be diagnosed with lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system, and about 27,600 patients will die, the clinic said.

The standard treatment for lymphoma is chemotherapy alone or in combination with radiation therapy. For patients who suffer a relapse, high-dose chemotherapy is combined with a bone marrow transplant. But, Fielding said, only about half or less of these advanced cases respond to treatment.

The Mayo Clinic has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to test the vaccine on patients with advanced non-Hodgkin's lymphoma who have failed to respond to the conventional treatment, Fielding said.