Experiment Pays Off as Virologist Treats Her Own Cancer

A scientist successfully treated her own Stage 3 breast cancer by injecting the tumor with viruses she grew in her lab. The unique case is described in a controversial report published in August in the journal Vaccines. Oncolytic virotherapy (OVT), in which genetically engineered viruses are used to kill tumor cells, has been used to treat cancers, especially late-stage cancers, for about a decade. But as Nature reports, "there are as yet no OVT agents approved to treat breast cancer of any stage, anywhere in the world." Beata Halassy studies viruses for a living, but she's no OVT expert. Still, when the Croatian virologist learned of a second recurrence of cancer in her breast in 2020, she chose to treat it with an unproven method of OVT.

Over six weeks, a colleague injected Halassy's tumor with two types of viruses Halassy had cultivated: first, a measles virus, followed by a vesicular stomatitis virus. "Both pathogens are known to infect the type of cell from which her tumour originated, and have already been used in OVT clinical trials," Nature reports. After just 11 days, Halassy's tumor started to shrink, per the Washington Post. According to Nature, "it also detached from the pectoral muscle and skin that it had been invading, making it easy to remove surgically." Once removed, the tumor was found to be "thoroughly infiltrated with immune cells called lymphocytes, suggesting that the OVT had worked as expected and provoked Halassy's immune system to attack both the viruses and the tumor cells," the outlet adds.

Halassy experienced no major side effects, apart from a daylong fever. After surgery, the University of Zagreb virologist received a year's treatment with the anticancer drug trastuzumab and has now been cancer-free for nearly four years. Though Halassy had her oncologists' approval to pursue OVT over chemotherapy, some experts view her approach as unethical, likely to encourage other patients to self-experiment in dangerous ways, and unlikely to contribute much to OVT research. Halassy and co-authors admit this was an "isolated" study that would be extremely difficult to replicate, but they say it should encourage clinical trials of OVT in early-stage cancers. They note clinical trials often involve patients who've recently undergone chemotherapy or radiotherapy, but Halassy hadn't receive chemo in years. (More cancer treatment stories.)