A Croatian scientist has cured herself of breast cancer. Injecting herself with viruses in her own lab, the scientist was able to reduce the tumour size sufficiently over the course of a few weeks to enable surgeons to remove it.
Beata Halassy is a virologist from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She was facing her second recurrence of breast cancer, after having already had a masectomy and one round of chemotherapy. She told media she couldn’t bare another round of chemo, and so began the self-experimentation.
Engineered viruses have become a cutting edge tool for cancer treatment. Keep in mind that cancers are cells from our own body that no longer self-regulate, but instead reproduce themselves endlessly. This threat, however, makes them more vulnerable to viruses. When infected with a virus, a healthy cell can shut down or self-destruct to prevent the virus from taking over and replicating itself. Cancer cells do not have this capacity.
In addition, when viruses are injected into tumour, the virus-generated destruction draws more attention to the cancer site from the body’s immune system. This can trigger a proper immune response to destroy the cancerous cells, which may have previously avoided being noticed by the immune system. The immune response may also help in preventing recurrence of the tumour.
Viral treatments for cancer are new but becoming more established. A virus-based melanoma treatment, TVEC, is approved and known to reduce melanoma incidence after surgery by about 25%.
An aspect of Beata Halassy’s story that has perplexed many outsiders is that such experiments are considered ethical questionable within the medical community. As a professor of medical law and ethics at Stanford commented about the case, “It is viewed as a bad idea for physicians to take care of their patients or themselves, because they lack the objectivity necessary to do a good job. The same thing holds for self-experimentation.”
Halassy herself commented that it took a very brave journal editor to publish her research report. Given the already slow academic research publishing cycle, this suggests it could have taken years for the details of Halassy’s experiment to have finally been made public.
To most, it will sound more like heroism than medical malpractice, but at least the research is now finally out there. Halassy’s bravery could end up changing many more lives than just her own.