This scientist used a virus grown in the lab to treat his own cancer.

Scientist who successfully cured himself breast cancer Injecting lab-grown viruses into tumors has sparked a debate about the ethics of self-experimentation.

In 2020, at the age of 49, Beata Halacy discovered she had breast cancer in the area where she had previously had a mastectomy. This was her second recurrence since her left breast was removed, and she was unable to undergo chemotherapy again.

Halacy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, studied the literature and decided to take matters into his own hands with unproven treatments.

Case report published in vaccine in august¹ Halasi outlines how she conducted the treatment herself. Oncolytic virus therapy (OVT) to help her with her own stage 3 cancer treatment. She has now been cancer free for 4 years.

When choosing self-experimentHalacy joins a long line of scientists who have participated in this discreet, stigmatized, and ethically questionable practice. “It took a courageous editor to publish the report,” Halacy said.

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OVT is an emerging field. cancer treatment It uses a virus to attack cancer cells and stimulate the immune system to fight them. To date, most OVT clinical trials have focused on late-stage metastatic cancer, but in recent years they have focused on early-stage cancer. One OVT, called T-VEC, has been approved in the United States to treat metastatic melanoma, but no OVT drug has yet been approved anywhere in the world to treat any stage of breast cancer.

Halacy emphasizes that although he is not an expert on OVT, his expertise in culturing and purifying the virus in the lab gave him the confidence to try the treatment. She chose to target her tumor with two different viruses in succession. measles virus Next is vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). Both pathogens are known to infect the cell types from which her tumor originates and are already being used in OVT clinical trials. Measles virus is being tested against metastatic breast cancer.

Halacy has previously worked with both viruses, and both have good safety records. The measles strain she chose is widely used in pediatric vaccines, and the VSV strain causes mild flu-like symptoms at worst.

Colleagues administered a series of treatment plans over two months, injecting Halachy's newly prepared research-grade material directly into her tumor. Her oncologist agreed to monitor her while she self-treated so that she could be switched to conventional chemotherapy if her symptoms worsened.

This approach appeared to be effective. During the course of treatment, the tumor significantly shrank and became softer without any significant side effects. It also detaches from the pectoral muscle and skin where it had invaded, making it easier to remove it surgically.

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Analysis of the tumor after resection showed a complete infiltration of immune cells called lymphocytes, indicating that OVT was working as expected, triggering Halachy's immune system to attack both the virus and the tumor cells. It was suggested that it did. “It certainly triggered an immune response,” Halacy said. After surgery, he received one year of treatment with the anticancer drug trastuzumab.

OVT expert Stephen Russell, who runs the viral therapy biotechnology company Viriad in Rochester, Minn., also said Halacy's case shows that the viral injections worked to shrink her tumor and recede its invasive edges. I agree with what you are suggesting.

But researchers are already trying to use OVT to treat early-stage cancer, so she doesn't think her experience truly breaks new ground. He said he doesn't know of anyone who has tried the two viruses back-to-back, but it's impossible to speculate whether this played a role in the problem.n 1 minute study. “Really, what's new here is that she used a virus on herself that she had grown in her lab,” he says.

ethical dilemma

Harathy felt a responsibility to present the results of his research. However, she received more than a dozen rejections from the journal. The main reason for this, she says, was that the paper she co-authored with a colleague involved self-experimentation. “The main concern has always been ethical issues,” Halacy says. She decided to try especially hard after coming across a review that emphasized the value of self-experimentation.².

Jacob Sharkow, a forensic scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he wasn't surprised that the journal had concerns. He is investigating the ethics of researchers' self-experimentation related to COVID-19 vaccines.

Significant jump in breast cancer survival rate

The problem is not that Halacy conducted the self-experiment, but that publishing her results could encourage others to reject conventional treatments and try similar treatments, Sharkow said. he says. Cancer patients are especially likely to try unproven treatments. However, he points out that it is also important to ensure that the knowledge gained from self-experimentation is not lost. The paper stresses that self-treatment with cancer-fighting viruses “should not be the first approach” when diagnosed with cancer.

Mr. Sharkow said, “I think it will ultimately fall within an ethical scope, but it is not a uniform lawsuit,'' and hopes that an explanation that embodies the ethical perspective will be published in parallel with the lawsuit report. He added that he was there. .

Harathy has no regrets about his self-medication and tenacious pursuit of publication. Because this treatment requires so much scientific knowledge and skill, she believes it is unlikely that anyone will try to imitate her. And that experience gave a new direction to her own research. In September she won funding to study OVT to treat cancer in livestock. “Thanks to my positive experience with self-treatment, the focus of my laboratory has completely changed,” she says.