When Beata Halassy discovered that her stage 3 breast cancer had returned despite having undergone a mastectomy, she couldn’t bring herself to go through another brutal round of chemo.
The expert infectious disease researcher, now 53, decided to take matters into her own hands, using her decades of virology expertise to create and inject an experimental vaccine directly into the tumor in her chest.
She combined a measles virus and a flu-like pathogen to create a potent shot that attacked the tumor directly and turbocharged her immune system to kill off any remaining cancer cells.
Dr Halassy knew that her DIY experiment ran the risk of a deadly blood clot forming in her lungs or causing a different fatal reaction. But, miraculously, it was a success and she has been cancer-free and in remission for four years.
The success of the treatment has raised ethical questions that Dr Halassy and other virus experts must contend with.
She has published her glowing results in the journal Vaccines which experts fear could lead to copycats without the proper expertise.
Dr Halassy writes: ‘The short-term and middle-term outcome of this unconventional treatment, which was devoid of any significant toxicity, was undoubtedly beneficial.’
Dr Beata Halassy developed viruses in her lab that she injected directly into the tumor in her breast. The tumor shrank and detached from her pectoral muscle, which allowed doctors to remove it more easily
In the journal Nature, a study into Dr Halassy’s treatment concludes that ‘self-medicating with oncolytic viruses should not be the first approach to dealing with diagnosed cancer.’
Her latest bout of breast cancer in 2020 was stage three, which is considered advanced with a high likelihood of spreading to other parts of the body.
The experimental treatment she tried is called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) and Dr Halassy has now been cancer-free for four years.
The experimental virus therapy that she designed for herself at her lab at the University of Zagreb in Croatia is typically reserved for cancer patients who have tried several rounds of chemo and radiation and are out of options.
Patients with advanced cancer often have weaker immune systems than healthy people, an effect of chemo and radiation treatments.
OVT directly destroys cancer cells, compensating for their weaker-than-normal immune response to cancerous cells.
OVT is experimental, but the potential benefits outweigh the risks for many people.
It’s not known how many people are taking this medical route. Still, an estimated 623,405 patients have breast, prostate, lung, colorectal, melanoma or bladder cancer that has spread to other parts of the body and has entered stage four or five. Those people could potentially benefit from OVT.
Federal health regulators have approved only one type of OVT, and it’s made to treat metastatic melanoma. However, there has not been any treatment approved for breast cancer.
Dr Halassy’s application has not been approved for widespread use.
After preparing the measles virus and the influenza-like VSV virus in her lab, a colleague injected them directly into her tumor over two months.
Oncologists kept a close eye on her, ready in the wings to begin a regiment of a common anti-cancer drug (not chemotherapy) called trastuzumab if something went wrong.
But they didn’t need to use it until those two months, a period during which the viruses stimulated the immune system to destroy cancer cells, ended.
Dr Halassy said: ‘An immune response was, for sure, elicited.’
The treatment shrunk the tumor, and it detached from the pectoral muscle it had latched onto, which allowed doctors to remove it more easily. She then continued with trastuzumab for about a year.
Dr Halassy tried for years to get medical journals to publish her findings but received rejection after rejection.
She said: ‘The major concern was always ethical issues.’
The three panels show the tumor (measured by the two perpendicular lines) shrinking over time, making it more easily removable via surgery
Injecting the tumor directly with viruses prompted a strong immune response that helped shrink the tumor. The immune system recognizes the virus-infected tumor cells as foreign and begins attacking them
Dr Halassy had spent years studying viruses. While she isn’t an OVT specialist, her career in cultivating and purifying viruses in her lab gave her the confidence to try it.
However, oncologists and other researchers say this approach is dangerous for the layperson with cancer, who might be more inclined to try an experimental treatment. Experts tend to agree on the idiom, ‘Don’t try this at home.’
Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who specializes in medical ethics, said he would have preferred to see a discussion of the ethical implications alongside the case report to provide more depth on the subject.
He added: ‘I think it ultimately does fall within the line of being ethical, but it isn’t a slam-dunk case.’
