A Scientist Experimented On Herself To Treat Her Stage-3 Breast Cancer. It Worked

A scientist who experimented on herself and successfully treated her stage 3 breast cancer has ignited an ethical debate among researchers over self-experimentation in medicine.

Beata Halassy, a virologist and head of a research unit at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, was aware of researchers experimenting with viruses to treat cancer. At the time, Halassy’s cancer had returned to the same site of her previous mastectomy. Halassy underwent a mastectomy when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016 and went through chemotherapy.

When the cancer came back in 2020, Halassy, who was 49 at the time, did not want to undergo another grueling round of chemotherapy. Instead, she reviewed existing research and experimented with a treatment known as oncolytic virotherapy (OVT), an emerging field of cancer treatment that uses genetically modified viruses to target cancer cells and stimulate the immune system to fight them. Halassy told her oncologists of her plans to treat her breast cancer using OVT, and they granted their approval.

Halassy worked with her colleagues to inject herself with two types of viruses that she had cultivated in a lab. According to the study, Halassy used a strain of the measles virus commonly found in childhood vaccines and a vesicular stomatitis virus known to cause mild influenza-like symptoms. Researchers say both viruses have good safety records and are known to infect the type of cells from which Halassy’s tumor originated.

At first, Halassy’s tumor swelled but then decreased during treatment. After two months, the tumor shrunk and became softer, while the surrounding tissue had loosened. This made it easier for surgeons to remove the tumor successfully. A tissue analysis showed that Halassy’s immune system successfully targeted the tumor, which was heavily infiltrated with immune cells known as lymphocytes. While Halassy had some mild side effects, including a fever, she did not have any serious adverse reactions during her treatment.

After the surgery, Halassy underwent a one-year treatment with trastuzumab, a common medication for treating certain types of breast cancer. During this time, oncologists at the University Hospital of Zagreb continuously monitored Halassy and were ready to step in to administer chemotherapy if necessary.

Halassy, now 53, has been cancer-free for four years. The virologist says the self-experiment successfully targeted her tumor and transformed her scientific work. “The focus of my laboratory has completely turned because of the positive experience with my self-treatment,” Halassy said.

Self-experimentation is not new in medical research

Halassy is not the first researcher to perform self-experimentation. “Halassy joins a long line of scientists who have participated in this under-the-radar, stigmatized, and ethically fraught practice,” the journal Nature reported.

Throughout the history of medicine, self-experimentation has led to major breakthroughs, but it is considered controversial and risky. In some cases, researchers have died. For example, Jesse Lazear was a 19th-century American doctor who studied yellow fever. Lazear died from the disease after he allowed a mosquito to bite him to prove how yellow fever was transmitted.

Other scientists, however, have survived the risks of self-experimentation. For example, Barry Marshall drank Helicobacter Pylori bacteria to prove that the infectious bacteria caused stomach ulcers. Dr. Marshall’s pioneering work with his colleague Robin Warren led the two Australian clinicians to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2005.

Some Scientists Critical of Halassy’s Self-Experimentation

Although Halassy’s self-experimentation was successful, it raised ethical questions among the scientific community. As a result, she found it difficult to publish the findings of her unique study. Halassy had over a dozen rejections from scientific journals before the journal Vaccines accepted her paper. “It took a brave editor to publish the report,” Halassy said.

Alta Charo, a professor emerita of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told The Washington Post that she does not view self-experimentation as unethical.

“From my perspective, self-experimentation is not fundamentally unethical,” Charo 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.”

In contrast, bioethicists Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson, and Julian Savulescu expressed concerns over what Halassy did. In an article for The Conversation website, the three professors said that while Halassy is a “success story of self-experimentation in medicine,” they were concerned that other “patients might be tempted to follow in Halassy’s footsteps and attempt an unconventional therapy, perhaps before using other standard therapies.”

Halassy told the journal Nature that she clearly wrote that experimenting on oneself “is not the appropriate first step” in a cancer diagnosis.

The three bioethicists believe scientists should sometimes be allowed to perform self-experimentation and have their studies published so others can learn from them.

“But it is a mistake to assume that self-experimentation only ever affects the individual involved,” they said in their article.” Halassy embarked on her self-experiment without any ethical oversight. Things ended well for her, but that won’t always be the case.”

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

In addition, Halassy’s study also noted that clinical trials for novel treatments like OVT are sometimes limited because they are carried out first on patients whose health may have already been affected by conventional therapies like chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Stephen Russell, an OVT specialist who runs Vyriad, a virotherapy biotech company in Rochester, Minnesota, agreed that Halassy’s viral injections helped to shrink her tumors. However, he does not believe her experience “breaks new ground” because researchers are already exploring OVT to treat earlier-stage cancer.

“Really, the novelty here is, she did it to herself with a virus that she grew in her own lab,” he said.

In 2015, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first OVT to treat patients with skin cancer. Since then, researchers have been working to expand the use of OVT to a wider range of cancers. Because Halassy only experimented with OVT on herself, scientists said her study is not likely to provide reliable conclusions on the effectiveness of her treatment for a wider population.

Despite the difficulties of getting published and criticism from the scientific community, Halassy felt that she had a duty to publish her findings. She was further motivated after reading a review that highlighted the value of self-experimentation.

Halassy hopes her work inspires additional research in using OVT in the early stages of cancer and in developing cancer treatments that are more effective and less harmful than currently available treatments.

Source Links:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/scientist-experimented-herself-treat-her-201519948.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03647-0
https://www.hudson.org.au/news/why-is-stomach-health-important/
https://www.jpost.com/science/science-around-the-world/article-829249
https://theconversation.com/is-it-ever-ok-for-scientists-to-experiment-on-themselves-243612