It’s Everything or Nothing

When Beata Halassy learned in summer 2020 that her breast cancer had come back, she made a bold decision. As a virologist at the University of Zagreb Homepage in Croatia, she knew that researchers around the world were testing virus-based cancer treatments that could avoid the destructive side effects of conventional treatments like chemotherapy.

Halassy, who studies viruses for a living, decided to test some on herself, it worked.

With her oncologists’ approval, she made herself a test subject and worked with colleagues to inject herself with two types of viruses that she cultivated in a lab, the science journal Nature reported. Over several weeks, her homegrown remedy caused her tumor to shrink, enabling surgeons to remove it.

In a study documenting her experiment, published August in the peer-reviewed journal “Vaccines,” Halassy and her co-authors said that the “unconventional” treatment has left her in remission for almost four years.

Bioethicists told The Washington Post they were split on Halassy’s decision to enter the storied, controversial tradition of self-experimentation in medicine and publish her results. While Halassy was uniquely qualified to weigh the decision and carry out her tests on herself, she still may have lacked the perspective of an objective researcher as her own test subject, they said. And her study of just one patient isn’t likely to provide enough information to draw conclusions about the treatments she tested.

Scientist Treated Her Own Cancer with Viruses She Grew in the Lab

“From my perspective, self experimentation is not fundamentally unethical,” said Alta Charo, a professor emerita of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It may be unwise. It may indeed be tainted by an unrealistic set of expectations.

… But I don’t see it as fundamentally unethical.”

Halassy and two of her co-authors did not respond to requests for comment, but Nature identified her as the researcher who was her own test subject. Halassy’s study describes the person treated as “a 50-year-old self-experimenting female virologist,” and she is the only person on the author list who meets that description.

Studies exploring the use of viruses to treat cancer date back over a decade. The Food and Drug Administration first approved a form of oncolytic virus therapy, the use of viruses modified to specifically attack cancer cells, to treat skin cancer in 2015. Research since then has sought to widen the range of cancers that OVT can be applied to. But clinical trials for novel treatments like OVT are sometimes limited, Halassy and her co-authors wrote in their study, by being carried out first on patients whose health may have already been affected by conventional treatments like chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Halassy was in a different situation. She was several years removed from her breast-cancer diagnosis in 2016 and her subsequent chemotherapy. And she was a rare subject who had the means and the know-how to produce and administer her own experimental viral treatment.

Scientist cures stage 3 cancer with lab-grown viruses, experts call it unethical

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, save for a day when Halassy developed a fever, and enabled surgeons to remove the tumor without further growth or spread in her body.

Halassy’s breast cancer had returned twice after her 2016 diagnosis. After the viral treatment, she has been cancer-free for 45 months, the study says. With the experiment, Halassy joins a long line of researchers who have tested medical theories on themselves. Their attempts have led to significant medical breakthroughs — and in some cases, harm or death.

Jesse Lazear, an American physician studying yellow fever in the 19th century, died of the disease after allowing himself to be bitten by a mosquito to prove how it was transmitted. Peruvian medical student Daniel Carrión died in 1885 after infecting himself with Carrión’s disease, which was later named after him.

Halassy’s self-experimentation didn’t appear to be nearly as risky as those fatal examples, said Hank Greely, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Law and the Biosciences. But he said critics might still question if a researcher in Halassy’s position could give informed consent to be a test subject and evaluate the potential benefits and harms of an experiment without bias.

“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.”

Halassy and her co-authors wrote that the study did not undergo a review by an ethics committee because it involved self-experimentation, and that the subject was “fully aware of her illness as well as of available therapies” and “wanted to try an innovative approach in a scientifically sound way.”

Opponents of the practice also argue that publicizing cases like Halassy’s risks encouraging less qualified patients to self-experiment in more dangerous ways, said Greely and Charo, the bioethics professor. They added that Halassy’s study of her response to OVT was likely too limited in scope to contribute reliably to research on the treatment.

“Not every experiment is research,” Charo said.

Halassy and her co-authors acknowledged in the study that it was “isolated” but said it should encourage clinical trials to assess the efficacy of OVT in early stages of cancer. …. They also said the circumstances of Halassy’s study would be very difficult to repeat.

“The study was feasible only due to the unique situation in which the patient was also an expert virologist,” the study states.

John Woods · 15/11/2024

· Society Scientists of Hungarian origin can treat cancer with viruses?

Scientist Injects Her Own Cancerous Tumor With Viruses She Grew in Lab

The miraculous recovery of Dr Beáta Halassy Dr Beáta Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, has made headlines with her extraordinary personal battle against breast cancer. When her cancer returned four years ago, she refused another gruelling round of chemotherapy. Instead, she turned to her scientific expertise to create a genetically engineered virus treatment that exposed cancerous cells to her immune system.

The results? Four years of cancer-free living.

Yet, despite her remarkable recovery, she continues to face scepticism from the scientific community. No more chemotherapy Dr Beáta Halassy’s ordeal began with a stage-three breast cancer diagnosis, a life-threatening condition with a significant risk of metastasis. Following several rounds of aggressive chemotherapy and a mastectomy, her cancer returned in 2020.

This time, she rejected conventional treatments, opting instead to rely on her decades of experience as a virologist Dr Halassy developed a “virus cocktail” that she injected directly into the tumour in her chest. Initially, the tumour grew, leaving her desperate. But after 50 days, it began to shrink, eventually becoming small enough to be surgically removed.

How does Beáta Halassy’s virus cocktail work?

Dr Beáta Halassy’s success lies in her innovative use of genetically engineered viruses. Combining strains of measles and vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), her cocktail specifically targeted cancerous cells. These viruses penetrated the malignant cells, effectively “opening” them so her immune system could identify and destroy them. Crucially, the viruses replicated only within cancerous cells, leaving healthy tissue unharmed.

Photo: PrtScr/Youtube Beáta Halassy

Beáta Halassy giving an interview for Croatian N1 TV. – Search Videos

The experimental nature of her treatment came with significant risks. To start with the least concerning one, she could have lost valuable weeks if the treatment had failed. Additionally, there was a serious danger of developing fatal complications, such as blood clots in her lungs. Despite these risks, her oncologist agreed to monitor the process and stood ready to intervene with conventional chemotherapy if necessary. Fortunately, no such intervention was required.

Dr Halassy has now been cancer-free for four years.

During this time, she has worked to publish her findings and share the story of her recovery. However, gaining scientific and medical recognition has proven challenging. Ethical questions from medical journals The therapy Dr Halassy used is part of an emerging experimental field called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT). “The strain of measles she chose is widely used in childhood vaccines, and the strain of VSV induces mild influenza-like symptoms”, Daily Mail wrote.

Medical journals initially refused to publish her results, citing ethical concerns. Critics feared that her success story might encourage cancer patients to pursue similar unregulated treatments, despite potential risks. Jacob Sherkow, a law and medical ethics researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, commented on these concerns.

“Her paper, finally published in the journal Vaccines, should have addressed the ethical implications of such a treatment,” he said. Dr Beáta Halassy herself acknowledged the limitations of her approach. “Maybe they do not always work as well as other treatments, but they are certainly less destructive,” she told Uncharted Territories. Hope for a new era in cancer treatment The potential impact of Dr Halassy’s treatment is vast.

With hundreds of thousands of patients suffering from advanced cancers—such as breast, lung, prostate, and melanoma—there is an urgent need for less toxic and more effective therapies. Dr Halassy’s case provides a glimpse of what might be possible. “Breast cancer remains the most common cancer worldwide and the leading cause of cancer-related death among women, accounting for 2.3 million diagnoses and 670,000 deaths in 2022, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)”, Medical Notes wrote.

Hungarian Roots

While Dr Halassy’s groundbreaking work is based in Croatia, she is of Hungarian descent, a detail noted by the Hungarian outlet Ripost. Her story is not only a testament to scientific ingenuity but also to the courage and determination of one woman to rewrite the rules of her own treatment.

Laboratory of Immunochemistry and Biochemistry

Scientific Advisor
Dr. SC. Beata Halassy
Phone: +385 1 641 43 13
E-mail: beata.halassy@unizg.hr

The question now is whether regulatory authorities and the broader scientific community will embrace oncolytic virotherapy, potentially bringing this innovative approach to patients in need around the world.

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Source: dailynewshungary.com https://dailynewshungary.com/miraculous-healing-of-dr-beata-halassy-cancer/

Scientist Injects Her Own Cancerous Tumor With Viruses She Grew in Lab

This scientist treated her own cancer with viruses she grew in the lab

A Virologist Took a Dramatic Step to Treat Her Cancer – InsideHook