Scientist treated his own cancer with viruses he cultivated in his laboratory

Virologist Beata Halassy says self-treatment worked, and it was a positive experience – but researchers warn it’s not something other people should try.

The case of a scientist who successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumor laboratory-grown viruses recently sparked a debate about the ethics of self-experimentation.

Beata Halassy she discovered in 2020, at age 49, that she had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy.

According to her, this was the second recurrence at the site since they had removed her left breast, and she could not face another chemotherapy treatment.

Halassy, virologist at the University of Zagrebstudied the available literature on the subject, and decided to take matters into his own hands — with a tratification so far unproven in scientific trials.

One of Halassy’s experience, published in August in the magazine Vaccines describes how the virologist self-administered a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) to help treat his own cancer, which was stage 3.

Halassy is now cancer free for four years.

By opting for self-experimentation, Halassy joins a long list of scientists who participated in this little-known, stigmatized and ethically difficult practice. “It took a brave editor to publish the report“, diz Halassy.

Therapy on the rise

OVT is a emerging area of ​​cancer treatment which uses viruses to attack cancer cells and induce the immune system to fight them.

To date, most clinical trials of OVT have been performed in advanced stages of metastatic cancer, but in recent years they have been oriented toward diseases in early stages.

An OVT trial, called T-THINGwas recently approved in the United States to treat metastatic melanoma, but there are no approved OVT agents yet to treat breast cancer at any stage, anywhere in the world.

Halassy emphasizes that is not an OVT specialist, but his experience in cultivating and purifying viruses in the laboratory gave him confidence to experiment the treatment.

The virologist chose attack the tumor with two different viruses consecutively – a measles virus followed by a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV).

Both pathogens are known to infect the cell type that gave rise to his tumor and have already been used in OVT clinical trials. A measles virus was tested against metastatic breast cancer.

Halassy had previous experience working with both virusesand both have a good safety record. The measles strain you chose is widely used in childhood vaccines, and the VSV strain induces, at worst, mild flu-like symptoms.

Over a period of two months, a colleague of the virologist administered a regimen of treatments using research material recently prepared by Halassy, ​​injected directly into the tumor.

Your oncologists agreed to monitor her during self-treatmentso she could switch to conventional chemotherapy if things went wrong.

A approach appeared to be effective: throughout the treatment, and without serious side effects, the tumor shrank substantially and became softer. It also separated from the pectoral muscle and the skin it was invading, which made it easier to surgically remove.

Analysis of the tumor after removal showed that it was completely infiltrated with immune cells called lymphocytes, suggesting that the OVT had worked as expected and triggered Halassy’s immune system to attack both the viruses and the tumor cells.

“It was, without a doubt, trigger an immune response“, says Halassy. After surgery, Halassy received a year of treatment with the anti-cancer drug trastuzumab.

Stephen Russellan OVT expert who runs the virotherapy biotechnology company Vyriad in Rochester, Minnesota, agrees that Halassy’s case suggests that the viral injections worked to shrink the tumor and cause its invasive edges to recede.

ethical dilemma

Halassy felt a responsibility to publish his findings, but received more than a dozen magazine rejections — mainly, says the scientist, because the article, written in co-authorship with colleagues, involved self-experimentation. “The main concern was always ethical issues,” he says.

The fact that magazines are concerned is not surprising Jacob Sherkowa law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who examined the ethics of researchers’ self-experimentation regarding COVID-19 vaccines.

O The problem isn’t that Halassy resorted to self-experimentation as such, but rather the fact that the publication of its results being able to encourage other people to reject conventional treatment and try something similar, says Sherkow.

People with cancer can be particularly susceptible to experiencing unproven treatments. However, he notes, it is also important to ensure that the knowledge resulting from self-experimentation it doesn’t get lost.

The document highlights that self-medication with cancer-fighting viruses “should not be the first approach” in the case of a cancer diagnosis.

“I think it ultimately falls along the line of ethics, but it’s not an easy case,” says Sherkow, adding that I would have liked to see a comment to develop the ethical perspectivepublished alongside the case report.

Halassy has no regrets of having self-treated or of having obstinately sought publication. She considers it unlikely that anyone will try to copy her, because the treatment requires a lot of scientific knowledge and skills.

And the experience gave a new direction to his own investigation: in September, it obtained funding to investigate OVT in the treatment of cancer in domestic animals. “The focus of my lab completely changed because of the positive experience with my self-treatment,” she says.