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At 49, a scientist suffering from a recurrence of her breast cancer self-administered virotherapy to overcome it. A method that paid off since the woman is now in remission. But the publication of his case poses ethical questions to the medical world.
Not to be repeated at home! According to a scientific publication, Beata Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, beat breast cancer by self-administering a homemade cocktail of two viruses. With success. However, his experiment raises questions.
An experiment on one’s own health
Beata Halassy discovered in 2020, at the age of 49, that she suffered from breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy. This was the second recurrence since the removal of her left breast and she did not want to resign herself to further chemotherapy.
As reported in his case published in Vaccinesshe therefore opted for another alternative: treating her stage 3 cancer with oncolytic virotherapy (or OVT), the injection of other viruses to weaken her cancer. She thus joins a long line of scientists who have participated in this discreet, stigmatized and ethically risky practice of self-experimentation.
What is oncolytic virotherapy called?
OVT is a new area of cancer treatment that uses viruses to attack cancer cells and trigger the immune system to fight them. Most OVT clinical trials to date have focused on advanced-stage metastatic cancer, but in recent years they have shifted toward earlier-stage disease. Lately, an OVT, called T-VEC, has been approved in the United States to treat metastatic melanoma, but there are no OVT agents yet approved to treat cancer anywhere in the world.
What does it matter to Beata Halassy. An expert in culturing and purifying viruses in the laboratory, she chose to target her 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 from which its tumor originates and have already been used in clinical trials of VTO.
A method that worked for the scientist
For two months, a colleague administered this cocktail to him, injected directly into his tumor. Oncologists agreed to monitor her during self-treatment, so she could switch to conventional chemotherapy if things went wrong.
The approach proved effective: over the course of treatment, and without serious side effects, the tumor shrank considerably and became softer. It also detached from the pectoral muscle and the skin it was invading, making it easier to remove surgically. As the article mentions in Natureanalysis of the tumor after it was removed showed that it was completely infiltrated by immune cells called lymphocytes, suggesting that the OVT worked as intended and prompted Halassy’s immune system to attack both viruses and tumor cells. “An immune response has been triggered, that’s for sure.”rejoiced the scientist. After the operation, she received a year’s treatment with the anticancer drug trastuzumab (Herceptin, a targeted therapy for so-called HER2+ breast cancers). She has now been free of her cancer for four years.
A victory but an ethical dilemma at stake
Based on her experience, Beata Halassy felt it was her duty to publish her results. But she received more than a dozen rejections from peer-reviewed journals, mainly because the paper, written in collaboration with colleagues, involved self-experimentation.
That the journals had concerns does not surprise Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has examined the ethics of researcher self-experimentation in relation to with COVID-19 vaccines.
“The problem is not that Halassy resorted to self-experimentation per se, but that publishing his results might encourage others to reject conventional treatments and try something similar.”explains Jacob Sherkow. “People with cancer may be especially likely to try unproven treatmentss”. Yet, he notes, it is also important to ensure that the knowledge gained from self-experimentation is not lost.
Halassy, for his part, does not regret his self-medication, nor his relentless quest for publications. She thinks it is unlikely that anyone will try to copy her, as the treatment requires a lot of scientific knowledge and skill and is unlikely to fall into everyone’s hands. Additionally, his experience gave a new direction to his own research. It perhaps joins the list of scientific advances made in an unconventional way.
Slide: Misconceptions about cancer