This scientist treated her Stage 3 breast cancer with lab-grown virus, researchers warn against…

A 49-year-old scientist successfully treated her breast cancer by using a virus she grew in the lab. Her self-treatment sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation. A case report published in Vaccines described the case as “unconventional” and “unique”.

Virologist Beata Halassy, 49, found in 2020 that she had breast cancer. She had a history of local recurrence of “triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). ”

According to Nature journal, Halassy had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy (a surgical procedure to remove all or part of one or both breasts). It was the second recurrence there since her left breast had been removed.

The virologist at the University of Zagreb had then decided to take matters into her own hands with an “unproven treatment”, Nature reported.

The case report explained how Halassy self-administered a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) to help treat her own stage 3 cancer. “She has now been cancer-free for four years”.

OVT represents a new approach to cancer therapy that employs viruses to target cancerous cells and stimulate the immune system to combat them.

Halassy emphasized that she is not an expert in OVT, but her skills in “cultivating and purifying” viruses in the lab assured her that she could try the treatment. She decided to target her tumor with two distinct viruses consecutively — first, a measles virus, and then a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV).

According to Nature, Halassy’s oncologists agreed to monitor her during the self-treatment, so that she would be able to switch to conventional chemotherapy if things went wrong.

“The intratumoural virus therapy was well tolerated…,” the report said, adding, “Two months after the start of the virus injections, the shrunken tumour was no longer invading the skin or underlying muscle and was surgically excised.

After the surgery, Halassy received a year’s treatment with the anticancer drug trastuzumab.

Breast cancer is said to be the most diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer-related death in women worldwide.

Criticism

Stephen Russell, an OVT specialist, reportedly agreed that Halassy’s case suggests the viral injections worked to shrink her tumour. But he didn’t believe that her experience really broke any new ground, “because researchers are already trying to use OVT to help treat earlier-stage cancer.”

He wasn’t aware of anyone trying two viruses sequentially, but said it isn’t possible to deduce whether this mattered in an ‘n of 1’ study. “Really, the novelty here is, she did it to herself with a virus that she grew in her own lab,” he was quoted by Nature as saying.

Ethical dilemma

Halassy, who wanted to publish her findings, received more than a dozen rejections from journals. She said she was met with rejections because the paper, co-authored with colleagues, involved self-experimentation.

“The major concern was always ethical issues,” said Halassy.

Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the problem is not that Halassy used self-experimentation as such, “but that publishing her results could encourage others to reject conventional treatment and try something similar”.

He, however, noted that it’s also important to ensure that the knowledge that comes from self-experimentation isn’t lost.

The authors of the paper emphasised that self-medicating with cancer-fighting viruses “should not be the first approach” in dealing with diagnosed cancer. But they wished to encourage formal clinical trials of assessing OVT as neoadjuvant therapy in early cancer.