This scientist treated her stage 3 breast cancer with a lab-grown virus, researchers warn… | mint

A 49-year-old scientist successfully treated her breast cancer using a lab-grown virus. His self-treatment sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation. A case report was published in vaccines Described the case as “unconventional” and “unique”.

Beata Halassi, a 49-year-old virologist, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020. She had a history of local recurrence of “triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC)”. ,

According to the journal Nature, Halassi had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy (a surgical procedure to remove all or part of one or both breasts). This was the second recurrence since the removal of her left breast.

Virologists at the University of Zagreb then decided to take matters into their own hands with an “unproven treatment,” Nature reports.

The case report details how Halassi self-administered a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) to help treat her stage 3 cancer. “He’s been cancer-free for four years now”.

OVT represents a new approach to cancer therapy that uses viruses to target cancer cells and stimulate the immune system to fight them.

Halassi stressed that she is not an expert in OVT, but her skills in “cultivating and purifying” the virus in the lab assured her that she could try the treatment. She decided to target her tumor with two different viruses in succession – first, a measles virus, and then a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV).

According to Nature, Halassi’s oncologist agreed to monitor her during self-treatment, so she could switch to conventional chemotherapy if things went wrong.

“Intratumoral virus therapy was well tolerated…,” the report said, adding, “Two months after virus injections began, the shrunken tumors no longer invaded the skin or underlying muscle.” and was surgically removed.

After surgery, Halassi received a year of treatment with the anti-cancer drug trastuzumab.

Breast cancer is considered the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer-related death in women worldwide.

Criticism

Stephen Russell, an OVT expert, reportedly agreed that Halassi’s case showed that the viral injections worked to shrink her tumor. But he didn’t believe his experience actually broke any new ground, “because researchers are already trying to use OVT to help treat early-stage cancer.”

He was not aware of anyone trying the two viruses sequentially, but said it was not possible to conclude whether it would matter in an ‘N of 1’ study. “In fact, the novelty here is that he did it himself with a virus that he had developed in his own laboratory,” Nature quoted him as saying.

ethical dilemma

Halasy, who wanted to publish her findings, received more than a dozen rejections from journals. He said he faced rejections because papers he co-wrote with colleagues involved self-experimentation.

“The major concern was always the ethical issues,” Halasy said.

Jacob Sherko, a law and medical researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the problem is not that Halassi self-experimented in this way, “but rather that publishing her results might cause others to reject conventional treatment and do something similar.” may be encouraged to try”.

However, he said it is also important to ensure that the knowledge gained through self-experimentation is not lost.

The paper’s authors stressed that self-treatment with cancer-fighting viruses “should not be the first approach” to dealing with diagnosed cancer. But they wanted to encourage formal clinical trials to evaluate OVT as neoadjuvant therapy in early cancer.