Beata Halassi, a 50-year-old scientist, treated her stage 3 breast cancer by injecting her tumor with a lab-grown virus. Halassi, a virologist at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, was diagnosed with her breast cancer in 2020 at the same location where she had a previous mastectomy.

According to a report in Nature, since this was the second recurrence, she tried to treat it herself because she could not face another round of chemotherapy.

Halassi’s case study, published in the journal Vaccines, revealed that virologists began trying an unproven treatment for cancer by combining the measles virus and a flu-like pathogen to create a powerful shot that would directly attack tumors. And helps the immune system.

After this treatment, Halassi has been cancer-free for four years. This self-administered experimental vaccine, called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT), helped cure him of stage 3 cancer.

More information about treatment

OVT is an emerging field of cancer treatment that uses viruses to attack cancer cells and then stimulate the immune system to fight them.

Most OVT clinical trials have been conducted on late-stage, metastatic cancer. But in the last few years, scientists have been directing its application to early-stage cancer as well.

According to Halassi, the measles virus and vesicular stomatitis virus included in the shot are known to infect a type of cell from which her tumor originated.

Learning this, she was able to combine the virus in the right amount and used it to treat herself. So far, both pathogens have been used in OVT clinical trials. Measles virus has been tested against metastatic breast cancer.

According to the report, Halassi is advocating using OVT as the first line of cancer treatment instead of existing procedures such as surgery, chemotherapy, biological therapy or radiation.

The medical research community appears to be divided regarding Halassi’s self-treatment of cancer. The authors of the study that published Halsey’s case in Vaccine, however, discourage self-medicating with OVT.

“The authors of this isolated and unconventional work state clearly that self-medicating with oncolytic viruses should not be the first approach to dealing with diagnosed cancer, but they are looking forward to evaluating OVT as neoadjuvant therapy in early cancer. Want to encourage formal clinical trials,” he wrote. ,