Scientists are researching viruses as a less destructive method to kill cancer cells than traditional chemotherapy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first viral cancer therapy in 2015. Viral oncology shows promise but has been tested on few patients in limited studies. The Washington Post reported on a recent study in the journal, Vaccines, about a breast cancer survivor treated with viruses.
When Beata Halassy learned in summer 2020 that her breast cancer had come back, she made a bold decision.She was several years removed from her breast-cancer diagnosis in 2016 and her subsequent chemotherapy.…breast cancer had returned twice after her 2016 diagnosis.
The patient was desperate, willing to try something new after three bouts of breast cancer in four years, despite having had a mastectomy.
Halassy and her colleagues used two types of viruses – a strain of measles used in vaccines, and vesicular stomatitis virus, which affects livestock – that she prepared in her own lab, according to the study. The viruses were injected directly into the tumor at various intervals over about six weeks.Around 11 days into the regimen, Halassy’s tumor began to shrink and continued to diminish gradually until it was small enough to be surgically excised after the six weeks of injections ended. It was a sterling result, the study states – the treatment came with few serious side effects…After the viral treatment, she has been cancer-free for 45 months, the study says.
What was different about this experiment is that the breast cancer patient and the research scientist were the same person. Beata Halassy is a virologist at the University of Zagreb in Croatia. Conventional chemotherapy had not kept her cancer at bay, and she knew viruses were being tested on cancer. She was willing to give it a try even if that meant working with her oncologist, a few trusted colleagues and becoming her own guinea pig.
Halassy’s experience was reported in a medical journal Vaccines, the results of which were somewhat dismissed by medical ethicists for a variety of reasons. Some said she lacked the perspective of an objective researcher. Others said a study of one patient is meaningless for research. Another claimed similar experiments had already been done before; it was hardly groundbreaking. One professor interviewed by the Washington Post said:
“It may be unwise. It may indeed be tainted by an unrealistic set of expectations. … But I don’t see it as fundamentally unethical.”
While another said:
‘In general, it is viewed as a bad idea for physicians to take care of their [family members] or themselves, because they lack the objectivity necessary to do a good job,’ Greely said. ‘The same thing holds for self-experimentation.’
Greely even worried it could encourage less qualified patients to self-experiment in more dangerous ways. The journal Nature went so far as to say:
Halassy joins a long line of scientists who have participated in this under-the-radar, stigmatized and ethically fraught practice.
It is hard to fathom the negative opinions from bioethicists. While a few applauded Halassy’s ingenuity, others worried about objectivity and informed consent (seriously?). Halassy’s article was rejected by a dozen medical journals because it was coauthored with colleagues involving self-experimentation. She called the journal editor who finally agree to publish her article “brave.” Yet, there is a long, storied history of scientists experimenting on themselves.
In the early days of scientific drug discovery researchers routinely experimented on themselves. In addition to feeling they had a moral duty to future test subjects, they believed their training and familiarity with a compound made them the best observers of its effects.
Public health experts and bioethicists seem more worried about a desperate researcher’s experimenting on herself than on the potential medical advancement she may have uncovered. Small scale clinical trials could easily and quickly pave the way for more robust clinical trials, with fewer resources wasted on largely worthless drug candidates. Halassy’s own experience has changed her research. She now has funding to pursue viral cancer treatment in domestic animals.
Washington Post: A scientist experimented on herself to treat her cancer. It worked.