When people are diagnosed with cancer, they often look to medical professionals to ensure that they receive the best care possible. In a way, that is what Dr. Beata Halassy did when she found out that she had stage 3 breast cancer. She turned to herself and her work for a self-treatment, and in the end was able to successfully treat her own breast cancer. She has now been cancer-free for four years. As a virologist at the University of Zagreb, Halassy studied the literature and later her self-experiment was detailed in a case report published in The National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine.
In 2020, Halassy discovered that she had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy, the removal of a breast. It was the second recurrence there since her left breast was removed. Discouraged by the prospect of going for another round of chemotherapy, Halassy took matters into her own hands.
The case study outlines how Halassy self-administered a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) by injecting the tumor. OVT is an advancing field in cancer treatment that uses viruses to attack the cancerous cells while also instigating the immune system into taking action. In the past few years, OVT clinical trials have shifted from a late-stage, metastatic focus, towards earlier-stage disease. In the United States, T-VEC, a type of OVT, has been approved to treat metastatic melanoma, but there is no approved OVT agent to treat breast cancer anywhere in the world. In choosing to self-experiment, Halassy has created a potential solution. However, she joins a list of scientists who have participated in stigmatized and ethically fraught practices. “It took a brave editor to publish the report,” says Halassy.
While Halassy is not a specialist in OVT, her experience in purifying viruses in a laboratory setting gave her the confidence to try this treatment. She chose to target her tumor with two different viruses, a measles virus followed by a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). Both of these viruses are known to infect the type of cell from which her tumor originated and had already been used in OVT clinical trials. Halassy also had previous experience working with both pathogens, which both have a good safety record. The measles virus is used extensively in childhood vaccinations, and the VSV, at worst, causes mild flu-like symptoms.
Over the period of two months, a colleague of Dr. Halassy administered the treatment directly into her tumor. Her oncologists agreed to monitor her during her self-treatment, in case she needed to switch to chemotherapy. Her approach proved effective as her tumor substantially shrank and became softer. The tumor detached from the pectoral muscle and skin that it had been invading, allowing it to be removed surgically. She also experienced no serious side effects.
Although Halassy felt a responsibility to publish her findings, she received numerous rejections from journals because her paper involved self-experimentation. “The major concern was always ethical issues,” says Halassy.
Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was not surprised by the journal’s reaction. “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, ” says Sherkow. He noted that people with cancer are susceptible to trying anything, including unproven treatments, but he notes that there is importance to ensuring that knowledge gained from self-experimentation is not lost.
In September, Halassy received funding to investigate OVT to treat cancer in domestic animals. She looks forward to taking what she has learned from her experiments and applying them in a broader scope.
