Beata Halassy decides to treat her breast cancer with an innovative virus-based self-experimentation. (Illustrative Image Infobae)
When Beata Halassy learned in the summer of 2020 that his breast cancer had returned, he made a bold decision. As a virologist in the University of Zagreb in Croatiaknew 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 of them on herself.
With the approval of his oncologists, he became a test subject and worked with colleagues to inject himself with two types of viruses that he grew in a laboratory, the scientific journal reported. Nature. For several weeks, her home remedy caused her tumor to shrink, allowing surgeons to remove it.
In a study documenting their experiment, published in August in the peer-reviewed journal “Vaccines”, Halassy and her co-authors said the “unconventional” treatment has left her in remission for almost four years.
Bioethicists told The Washington Post who were divided over the decision to Halassy to enter the historic and controversial tradition of self-experimentation in medicine and publish its results. Although Halassy was uniquely qualified to evaluate the decision and conduct its testing herself, she still might have lacked the perspective of an objective investigator by being her own test subject, they said. And your study of just one patient probably won’t provide enough information to draw conclusions about the treatments you tried.
“From my perspective, self-experimentation is not fundamentally unethical.”said Alta Charo, professor emeritus of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It can be reckless. In fact, it may be flawed by an unrealistic set of expectations… But I don’t see it as fundamentally unethical.”
Halassy and two of his co-authors did not respond to requests for comment, but Nature He identified her as the researcher who was his own test subject. The study of Halassy describes the person treated as “a 50-year-old self-experimenting virologist,” and she is the only person on the list of authors who meets that description.
Studies exploring the use of viruses to treat cancer date back more than 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. Since then, research has sought to expand the range of cancers to which it can be applied OVT. But clinical trials for novel treatments like OVT are sometimes limited, they wrote. Halassy and his co-authors in their study, as they are first carried out in patients whose health may have already been affected by conventional treatments such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
Halassy, a virologist from Zagreb, works with her oncologists and injects viruses into her own tumor. (Illustrative Image Infobae)
Halassy I was in a different situation. Several years had passed since his diagnosis of breast cancer in 2016 and his subsequent chemotherapy. And it was a rare subject who had the means and knowledge to produce and administer his own experimental viral treatment.
Halassy and his colleagues used two types of viruses — a strain of measles used in vaccines and the vesicular stomatitis virus, which affects cattle — that they prepared in their own laboratory, according to the study. The viruses were injected directly into the tumor at various intervals for approximately six weeks.
About 11 days after starting the regimen, the tumor Halassy It began to shrink and continued to gradually shrink until it was small enough to be surgically removed after the six-week injection period was over. It was an excellent result, the study notes: the treatment had few serious side effectsexcept for one day when Halassy developed a fever, allowing surgeons to remove the tumor without further growth or spread in his body.
Halassy’s breast cancer had returned twice after her diagnosis in 2016. After viral treatment, he has been cancer-free for 45 months, the study says.
With the experiment, Halassy He joins a long list of researchers who have tested medical theories on themselves. Their attempts have led to important medical advances—and in some cases, harm or death. Jesse Lazear, an American doctor who studied yellow fever In the 19th century, he died of the disease after allowing a mosquito to bite him to demonstrate how it was transmitted. The Peruvian medical student Daniel Carrion He died in 1885 after becoming infected with Carrion diseasewhich was later named in his honor.
The self-experimentation of Halassy didn’t seem to be as risky as those fatal examples, said Hank Greely, director of the Stanford University Center for Law and Life Sciences. But he said critics might still question whether a researcher in Halassy could give informed consent to be a test subject and evaluate the potential benefits and harms of an experiment without bias.
“It is generally considered a bad idea for doctors to care for their [familiares] or themselves”Greely said. “The same applies to self-experimentation.”.
After six weeks of viral treatment, his tumor shrinks and is surgically removed. (Illustrative Image Infobae)
Halassy and his co-authors wrote that the study was not reviewed by an ethics committee because it involved self-experimentation, and that the subject was “fully aware of his disease as well as available therapies” and “wanted to try an innovative approach in a scientifically sound manner.”
Opponents of the practice also argue that publicizing cases like that of Halassy runs the risk of encouraging less qualified patients to self-experiment in more dangerous ways, said Greely and Charo, the bioethics professor. They added that the study of Halassy about his response to OVT It was probably too limited in scope to reliably contribute to treatment research.
“Not every experiment is research.”Charo said.
Halassy and his co-authors acknowledged in the study that it was “isolated” but said it should encourage clinical trials to evaluate the effectiveness of the OVT in early stages of cancer. They also said that the circumstances of the study Halassy They 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.”says the study.
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