Virotherapy: Scientist treats her recurring cancer with virus

In perhaps the first of its kind of feat in the world, a virologist successfully treated her breast cancer by injecting two viruses.

When virologist Beata Halassy of University of Zagreb learnt her cancer had returned for the second time in 2020, she decided to opt for experimental treatment known as virotherapy instead of conventional treatment involving chemotherapy.

Virotherapy refers to the experimental treatment approach in which viruses are converted into therapeutics to treat diseases. Primarily, such an approach is used to treat cancer, genetic conditions, and in immune system-related conditions.

While virotherapy has previously been used in early-stage cancers, Halasssy used it to treat her stage 3 cancer.

Halassy’s case has come to light after she published the details of her case in a research paper titled ‘An Unconventional Case Study of Neoadjuvant Oncolytic Virotherapy for Recurrent Breast Cancer’ in journal ‘Vaccines’ earlier this year.

How Halassy used viruses to beat cancer

In 2020, Halassy learnt that she had cancer for the third time, according to the paper.

Previously, Halassy had first been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016. After treatment involving mastectomy, the cancer returned in 2018 and then again in 2020.

In 2020, instead of opting for another round of chemotherapy, Halassy pursued oncolytic virotherapy (OVT). The approach uses reworked viruses to attack the cancerous cells and the at the same time trigger the immune system into attacking cancerous cells.

As a virologist, she was already familiar with viruses, so she set out to rework two viruses into therapeutics.

Halassy picked a measles virus and a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) and converted them into therapeutics.

Until then, OVT was completely unproven and only experimental and that too for only early-stage cancers.

Both the measles and VSV viruses are known to infect the type of cell from which Halassy’s cancerous tumour originated and have already been used in OVT clinical trials, according to Nature.

For two months, a colleague administrated the cocktail produced from two viruses by Halassy. The cocktail was injected into the tumour.

The treatment worked as the tumour shrank and softened, according to Nature.

The outlet reported that the tumour also detached from the muscle and skin that it was invading, making it easier to remove it surgically.

Analyses showed that the tumour was also attacked by immune system of the body, meaning that the treatment had also succeeding in triggering the immune system to attack the cancerous cell.

But ethical concerns persist

Even though the experimental approach worked in Halassy’s case, several people have strong ethical reservations against such an approach.

Halassy received rejections from several journals when she reached out to publish her case study.

The problem is not that Halassy used self-experimentation as such, but that publishing her results could encourage others to reject conventional treatment and try something similar, said Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to Nature.

To be sure, Halassy’s paper has said that self-experimentation should not be the first choice of treatment.