Virologist Beata Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, has beaten breast cancer with viruses she grew in the lab in a brave yet ethically questionable self-experiment.
When Beata discovered that she had a second recurrence of breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy (surgery to remove a breast) in 2020, she decided not to undergo a second round of chemotherapy. Instead, she decided to utilize an unproven treatment in oncolytic virotherapy or OVT.
How did Beata beat cancer?
Beata injected lab-grown viruses into her tumor. When she tried out OVT, her cancer was already at the third stage, or the locally advanced stage. However, post-treatment, she has been cancer-free for four years.
OVT is an upcoming cancer therapy that uses viruses to attack cancerous cells and provoke the immune system into attacking and killing the cancerous cells. An OVT procedure named T-VEC has been approved in the United States for treating metastatic melanoma. However, no OVT has been approved for any kind of breast cancer treatment.
Halassy isn’t a specialist in OVT. However, years of experience in growing and purifying viruses in the lab gave her an upper hand. She targeted her tumor with two different viruses— measles virus, which is already being used in OVT clinical trials against metastatic breast cancer, and vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV).
Both the viruses are safe, as the measles virus Halassy put to use is used in vaccines, while the VSV strain used causes mild flu-like symptoms at most. Over a two-month period, a colleague of Beata injected research-grade, freshly prepared material into the tumor. Her oncologists were ready to intervene with chemotherapy if things went south.
The method worked as the tumor shrank and grew soft. It also detached from the pectoral muscle and skin it was invading, making its removal easier via surgery. After the surgery, she took anticancer drugs for a year, and now, she has spent four years without cancer.
Analysis of the tumor showed infiltration by lymphocytes, which indicated that the immune system had taken charge of eliminating both the virus and the cancerous cells. The conclusion: OVT has worked its wonders as expected.
Is this self-experiment ethical?
Choosing self-experimentation is a brave move, mostly due to the uncertainty that is intertwined with any experiment. Halassy has joined a long line of scientists who chose this ethically fraught route of experimentation.
Halassy received rejections from journals where she submitted her findings. Self-experimentation was the major roadblock. Halassy herself has no regrets regarding her unconventional treatment methods. She also believes that it is highly unlikely that someone will replicate her self-experiment since it requires experience in the field. On the brighter side, she has received funding to study the effects of OVT in domestic animals. Finally, she calls the editor a brave one for choosing to publish her paper.
Even though the experiment roams somewhere at the borderline of ethical motives, the courageous advancements of Beata Halassy will be forever etched in the history of successful self-treatment.
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