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When a Croatian virologist learned she had a breast cancer tumor, she decided to grow her own viruses to fight the disease – a radical departure from medical norms that appears to have worked.
Like the news Nature According to reports, Beata Halassy of the University of Zagreb’s risky self-treatment gamble has sparked a mix of controversy and admiration among her colleagues.
After learning in 2020 that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer for the third time after a mastectomy, Halassy researched oncolytic virotherapy (OVT), which, as the name suggests, uses viruses to fight disease by triggering immune responses. Although far from unprecedented and approved for early-stage metastatic melanoma, there are no government-approved OVT treatments for breast cancer anywhere in the world – which made the whole experiment questionable to Halassy, her doctors and colleagues, and it academic journal. which ultimately allowed her to tell her story.
The virologist had a colleague administer a mix of measles, commonly used in childhood vaccines, and a vesicular stomatitis virus, both of which were known to infect the cell type she was trying to destroy and provoke the kind of immune response she needed. As the two-month trial progressed, the tumor shrank and detached from her muscles and skin, making it easier to remove surgically. When a biopsy was taken after removal, Halassy and her colleagues discovered that their gamble had paid off.
“An immune response was definitely provoked,” the virologist said.
This all took place in 2020, meaning Halassy has now been cancer-free for four years – but when it came to sharing her results with the world, she struggled.
After writing paper proposals about her experiences and submitting them to journals, the researcher faced rejection again and again. Most editors wouldn’t do it, she notes, because they were concerned about the ethics of self-experimentation—and especially because they feared that others with less knowledge might try to do something similar with catastrophic consequences.
Law and medicine researcher Jacob Sherkow of the University of Illinois-Champaign – who was not involved in Halassy’s article – said Nature that journals must walk the line between highlighting the knowledge gained from controversial self-experimentation without promoting it as a first step.
As a specialist who studied self-experimentation methods during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sherkow said he thinks Halassy’s study “falls within the line of ethics, but it’s not a slam-dunk case.”
Ultimately, Halassy’s article found a place in the magazine Vaccineswho published her ‘unconventional case study’ last August, as the title indicates.
Despite her publication problems, the virologist is proud of her experiment and the people who brought it to publication.
“It took a brave editor to publish the report,” Halassy said Nature.
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