Researcher Cures Herself of Cancer Using Viruses She Grew in Lab

Virologist Beata Halassy says self-medication helped her beat breast cancer. She injected lab-grown viruses into her tumors. Other researchers warn that it is not safe to repeat her experiment. Halassy's experiment has sparked a debate about the ethics of self-experimentation, writes Nature.

Photo: Serhii Suravikin | Dreamstime.com

In 2020, at the age of 49, Beate Halassy discovered that she had a new tumor at the site of her previous mastectomy. It was the second recurrence since she had her left breast removed. She was unable to withstand another course of chemotherapy.

Halassy, ​​a virologist at the University of Zagreb, decided to take matters into her own hands and try the unproven treatment on herself.

A case report published in Vaccines in August 2024 describes how Halassy self-administered a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) to cure her own stage 3 cancer. Four years have passed since then, and there has been no recurrence. By choosing to experiment on herself, Halassy joined a long line of scientists who have participated in this stigmatized and ethically dangerous practice. “It took a brave editor to publish the report,” Halassy says.

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Promising therapy

OVT is a new area of ​​cancer treatment that uses viruses to both attack cancer cells and provoke the immune system to fight them. Most OVT clinical trials have so far been conducted in late-stage metastatic cancer, but in the last few years they have been focused on earlier-stage disease. One OVT, called T-VEC, has been approved in the United States for metastatic melanoma, but there are no OVT drugs approved for breast cancer of any stage anywhere in the world.

Halassie stresses that she is not an expert in OVT, but her experience culturing and purifying viruses in the lab led her to try the treatment. She decided to sequentially treat her tumor with two different viruses—first measles, then vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). Both pathogens are known to infect the cell type from which her tumor arose and have already been used in clinical trials of OVT. The measles virus has been tested against metastatic breast cancer.

Halassie had previous experience with both viruses, and they both have good safety records. The measles strain she chose is widely used in childhood vaccines, while the VSV strain causes, at worst, mild flu-like symptoms.

Over the course of two months, her colleague administered a course of treatment using research-grade material freshly prepared by Halassy. The viruses were injected directly into the tumor. Her oncologists agreed to monitor her during the self-treatment so that she could switch to conventional chemotherapy if anything went wrong. The approach worked: Over the course of the treatment, and without serious side effects, the tumor significantly shrank and softened. It separated from the chest muscle and skin it had invaded, allowing it to be easily removed surgically.

Analysis of the tumor after removal showed that it was completely infiltrated with immune cells called lymphocytes, suggesting that OVT had worked as expected and triggered Halassy's immune system to attack both viruses and tumor cells.

“There was definitely an immune response,” said Halassi, who was treated with the cancer drug trastuzumab for a year after the surgery.

Stephen Russell, an OVT specialist who runs the virotherapy biotech company Vyriad in Rochester, Minn., agrees: Halassy's case suggests that the viral injections helped shrink the tumor and cause its invasive edges to recede.

But he doesn’t think her experience is groundbreaking. Researchers are already trying to use OVT to treat early-stage cancer. He doesn’t know anyone who has tried two viruses in sequence.

"What's really new here is that she did this to herself using a virus that she grew in her own lab," concluded Stephen Russell.

Ethical dilemma

Halassy felt compelled to publish her findings. But she was rejected by a dozen or so journals, mostly, she says, because the paper, co-authored with colleagues, involved self-experimentation. “The main problem was always the ethical issues,” Halassy says.

That the journals raised concerns doesn't surprise Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has studied the ethics of self-experimentation by researchers on COVID-19 vaccines.

The problem isn’t that Halassy used self-experimentation per se, but that publishing her findings could encourage others to abandon conventional treatments and try something similar, Sherkov says. People with cancer may be especially susceptible to trying unproven treatments. Still, he notes, it’s important to ensure that the knowledge gained from self-experimentation isn’t lost.

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"I think it's ultimately ethical, but it's not a perfect case," Sherkov says, adding that he would like to see a commentary outlining the ethical perspective published alongside the researcher's report.

Halassy doesn’t regret self-medicating or her dogged determination to publish her findings. She thinks it’s unlikely that anyone will try to copy her, because the treatment requires so much scientific expertise. And the experience has given her own research a new direction: In September, she received funding to study OVT as a cancer treatment for pets. “The direction of my lab research has completely changed because of the positive experience I had with self-medicating,” she says.

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