Self-Experimenting Virologist Defeats Breast Cancer With Lab-Grown Virus Treatment (nature.com) 84
A University of Zagreb virologist treated her own recurring breast cancer by injecting laboratory-grown viruses into her tumor, sparking debate about self-experimentation in medical research. Beata Halassy discovered her stage 3 breast cancer in 2020 at age 49, recurring at the site of a previous mastectomy. Rather than undergo another round of chemotherapy, she developed an experimental treatment using oncolytic virotherapy (OVT).
Over two months, Halassy administered measles and vesicular stomatitis viruses directly into the tumor. The treatment caused the tumor to shrink and detach from surrounding tissue before surgical removal. Post-surgery analysis showed immune cell infiltration, suggesting the viruses had triggered an immune response against the cancer. Halassy has been cancer-free for four years. OVT remains unapproved for breast cancer treatment worldwide. Nature adds: Halassy felt a responsibility to publish her findings. But she received more than a dozen rejections from journals -- mainly, she says, because the paper, co-authored with colleagues, involved self-experimentation. "The major concern was always ethical issues," says Halassy. She was particularly determined to persevere after she came across a review highlighting the value of self-experimentation.
That journals had concerns doesn't surprise Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has examined the ethics of researcher self-experimentation in relation to COVID-19 vaccines. 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, says Sherkow. People with cancer can be particularly susceptible to trying unproven treatments. Yet, he notes, it's also important to ensure that the knowledge that comes from self-experimentation isn't lost. The paper emphasizes that self-medicating with cancer-fighting viruses "should not be the first approach" in the case of a cancer diagnosis.
Over two months, Halassy administered measles and vesicular stomatitis viruses directly into the tumor. The treatment caused the tumor to shrink and detach from surrounding tissue before surgical removal. Post-surgery analysis showed immune cell infiltration, suggesting the viruses had triggered an immune response against the cancer. Halassy has been cancer-free for four years. OVT remains unapproved for breast cancer treatment worldwide. Nature adds: Halassy felt a responsibility to publish her findings. But she received more than a dozen rejections from journals -- mainly, she says, because the paper, co-authored with colleagues, involved self-experimentation. "The major concern was always ethical issues," says Halassy. She was particularly determined to persevere after she came across a review highlighting the value of self-experimentation.
That journals had concerns doesn't surprise Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has examined the ethics of researcher self-experimentation in relation to COVID-19 vaccines. 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, says Sherkow. People with cancer can be particularly susceptible to trying unproven treatments. Yet, he notes, it's also important to ensure that the knowledge that comes from self-experimentation isn't lost. The paper emphasizes that self-medicating with cancer-fighting viruses "should not be the first approach" in the case of a cancer diagnosis.
I'm all grown up (Score:3, Insightful)
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Quite frankly, it is disgusting. Why should the government forbid you from doing something to yourself. If you want to try something experimentally, and some doctor or laboratory or research institute is willing to let you try it, what business is it of anyone else's? Let alone the government? Maybe make a rule that all research material and related data be made available, so nothing is held back from making an informed decision. But perh
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We don't need people self-experimenting with diseases when they aren't already knocking on deaths door, that's how we get the next plague.
+1 It's fine if you're probably gonna die anyway and you can self-isolate while doing so.
-1 If you do survive, but you somehow create the T-virus (Resident Evil) that turns people in to Zombies, or Republicans.
Re:I'm all grown up (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a whole lot of people who would agree with you if they hadn't died from attempting some form of DIY treatment for an otherwise perfectly manageable disease.
While I'm not de-facto against people experimenting on themselves for science, it's not something I feel we should be actively encouraging. The proper way forward here would have been to try replicating the results in a more acceptable manner (e.g. in mice or whatever) and get that published so the technique is out there and documented. Save the story about injecting yourself first for your memoirs.
=Smidge=
Re: I'm all grown up (Score:5, Insightful)
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Your body, your choice.
Not according to the Supreme Court. You do not have the right to privacy as outlined in the 9th Amendment, nor do you have bodily autonomy. In fact, a corpse has more rights than you do. No organ can be removed from a corpse without that person's consent, even if use of the organ would save another life.
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Your body, your choice.
* Does not apply to abortion or cannabis
Re: I'm all grown up (Score:3, Insightful)
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Hmm, but given her profession and what she has access to, maybe there has to be constraints. Say she was doing other gain of function self-experiments that could somehow pose a danger to others? Probably unlikely, I dunno, but I'm not sure if all constraints should go out the window. I still think what she did was brave, and shouldn't have the info suppressed. We should learn what we can from it.
Re: I'm all grown up (Score:5, Informative)
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Self-experimentation needs to be allowed since it's part of the right to bodily autonomy. However publishing the results does have some reliability issues, a sample size of 1 and they're only published by people who survived.
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People facing a painful death or long term suffering are often willing to try risky things. It's just human nature, especially when any properly licensed treatment may be decades away.
It would help if it was easier to get onto studies trying out new treatments, or if doctors were more able to offer experimental ones.
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I don't need the government, my doctor, or anyone else to hide information for my own good.
Don't worry, the incoming administration will be hiding things for their own good and won't even be thinking about you.
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Oh good grief, get over yourself. Not everything is about you.
The ethical concerns have arisen for a variety of very good reasons. And yet, there are still venues to publish formally in addition to the various preprint archives available.
You can get the research just fine, but no editor is obliged to publish it where you personally think it should be published.
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The thing is, self-experimentation when you're looking death in the mirror is basically the better of two outcomes.
"Yes, this worked for me, but I'm the patient looking from inside in these treatments". This is why a lot of lab animals are proxies for Humans, because it's unethical to give people a fatal disease and then treat it, yet a rat or a pig we don't consider "human". We don't experiment on Elephants or Dolphins because these animals are smarter than "pet" animals like cats and dogs, and fellow huma
Re: I'm all grown up (Score:2)
Experimenting on elephants or dolphins would be economically unviable regardless of any other constraints. We do experiment on other primates mind you which are somewhat cheaper. Even then it is generally only in late stages of treatment development that you get to primates because it's to expensive to do early stage testing in them.
Re:$$ big pharma $$ (Score:4, Interesting)
I could mod you down, but I won't because I can answer instead and it's probably worth it.
Firstly, cancer charities, which have huge amounts of money are completely capable of developing cures on their own if they want to. Secondly many of them are run by fanatics who have lost relatives to cancer and would absolutely do anything they could to get a cure out. Thirdly, the idea that viruses can be targeted at cancers is hardly new and there are a bunch of different companies working on it at this very moment. In fact genetic targeting of tumors is becoming a mainstream part of cancer treatment t this very point.
The real problem with crazed conspiracy people is that you push the crazy cover stories that put people off researching the real stuff that's actually going down. Here is an example. There actually are problems where people will patent medicines just in order to protect their main product. Because they can completely block competition this means that fewer different variants of drugs that do the same thing become available, which is a problem for people who get allergies. Much more commonly just that people who had nothing to do with the research and who don't fund useful research just do massive price gouging.
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Good post, definitely worth the effort. We need less crazy conspiracy theories in the world, not more. Better to squash them or at least discourage their spread with a well reasoned post.
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The conspiracy theory is always far more complex than reality-based explanations. Sadly, it seems many people seek comfort deluding themselves in these fantasy worlds to avoid the hard mental cost of reality.
did she read this work? (Score:2)
Bad ass (Score:5, Insightful)
Get over it. Procedures and data needs to be published. That's kinda what real scientists do. Everyone in the field understands what it means to have a sample size of 1.
And yes. This chick deserves the bad ass of the year award. How do you get more awesome than that?
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100% bad ass. I logged in to see if I had mod points for you. No points so you get a reply in agreement.
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This is actually a variation of an approach that was used before antibiotics became available. It's not *really* surprising that it worked, but making it work dependably...now that's another matter.
IIUC, the idea is that this works because the immune system already recognized measles as an enemy, so it attacks cells that display signs of measles infection, and breaks them open. Then it recognizes "inappropriate" molecules released by the broken cell as signs of an invader, and starts attacking cells that
Re:Bad ass (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets be honest; both chemotherapy and radiation therapy are 'very iffy approaches.'
If this approach is slightly less iffy, that's a good thing.
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Lets be honest; both chemotherapy and radiation therapy are 'very iffy approaches.'
If this approach is slightly less iffy, that's a good thing.
Exactly. This is just another variation on the theme "lets see if we can hurt the cancer more than we can hurt the patient". Sadly most cancer treatments fall into that category.
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Age of Statistics (Score:2)
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Who knows, maybe in a minority of people injecting very tiny bits of peanut butter into the tumor might cause the tumor to get wiped out..
Is there any reason to believe that peanut butter will work? I think this pretty much sums up the problem. Instead of understanding the science, medical science relies on math. And the health care industry is a factory with quality control processes, so your doctor gives you a shot based on recommendations determined by the statistics of a population you are part of instead of an assessment of your individual needs. Which may help explain why the United States has the most expensive medical care in the wor
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A flu shot makes you feel crappy for a day, which is better than getting the flu.
Maybe, but one is guaranteed the other purely speculative. I haven't had the flu in a very long time. Does that mean I am immune? Probably not, its just that getting the flu is not a random event. You have to be exposed to it and I probably haven't been. At least not sufficiently exposed to overcome whatever immunity I have.
There are other reasons than personal protection to get a vaccine, some have public heath benefits for everyone. We all but eliminated measles because we insisted children in schools be
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One reason is that when the cells are destroyed, the immune system goes looking for a reason, and it's sorting through, among other things, the internals of the cells that were destroyed. Sometimes it will latch onto part of that as a cause.
You might reasonably as "Why doesn't everything cause an autoimmune disease?", but the only answer I have is that the immune system is pretty good at recognizing whether something is just "a normal part of me", but it's not perfect.
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Betcha these journals evaluate this paper with rigor and discernment. Unlike thousands of papers that come from the Establishment.
Researchers have internalized economic incentives (Score:2)
I get the impression researchers rationalize economically inspired prejudice as rationality/scepticism/ethics.
Treatments which due to their nature are hard to monopolize and can only make it through trial through public money are instinctively bashed. The level of evidence and consistent beneficial effect they demand is absurdly much higher than for privately developed monopolized medicine.
Susceptible to trying unproven treatments (Score:5, Insightful)
People with cancer are also particularly susceptible to dying from proven treatments.
If you get cancer and you have some specialized knowledge of the field, go for it!
Like the doctor that used his own immunotherapy research to cure his own glioblastoma [bbc.com]. That's a cancer that's 100% fatal anyways. Why not try it?
Re:Susceptible to trying unproven treatments (Score:5, Insightful)
The doctor that proved ulcers were caused by bacteria didn't just cure himself, he intentionally gave himself an ulcer and then cured it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall
Did She get the Measles? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just wondering - the summary says she injected herself with Measles. Was that injected viral load alive or dead?
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I expect that it was the live virus, and that she already had an immunity to measles. That's usually required for this kind of approach to work. (IIUC, it's a variation of an approach that was used before antibiotics became available. And there are LOTS of caveats. It frequently works, but not frequently enough to depend on, and there can be bad side effects.)
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If whatever is being injected ends with mab there is the side effect of a lot of profit.
If they just use a cheap generic vaccine, not so much.
Just respect .... (Score:1)
... and hope her treatment gets support.
She injected viruses her immune system knew (Score:2)
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Wonder why she didn't just use adjuvants.
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You're right. A pretty dicey one though.
Could have just picked a bunch of vaccines instead.
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Sample size of 1 (Score:3)
What actually caused the cancer to go away? It's well known that people regularly defeat cancer with no medical treatment whatsoever. https://medicalxpress.com/news... [medicalxpress.com] And the presence of immune cells in the tumor...does this support her hypothesis that the immune cells killed the tumor, or that the immune cells were attacking the viruses she injected?
I don't know, but I do know that I wouldn't want to risk my life based on the results of a study with a sample size of 1.
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I don't have a problem that this woman did the experiment, and I'm happy that it seemed to work for her. As for "knowledge" I'm not sure that we've actually gained any knowledge at this point. We have a hypothesis that has a (single) positive test result. My only concern, is that we consider such results with appropriate skepticism. The article was criticizing the journals for not publishing her work. I think I agree with the journals on this one. Publishing this kind of study gives it more weight than is w
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I don't know, but I do know that I wouldn't want to risk my life based on the results of a study with a sample size of 1.
IMO the important thing here isn't the efficacy of the treatment - that may be legitimate or a coincidence, and there's no way to tell right now. The important thing is the ethical consideration, which you've obliquely referred to here.
If I had recurring cancer which carried with it a high incidence of both additional disfigurement and possible death, I might well be willing to undergo such an experimental treatment. And the self-styled ethicists who are objecting to a) what this brave woman did, and/or b)
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I think also the ethics of studying cures for terminal diseases isn't great no matter what. Scientific method dictates that you do a double blind study, but in the case you hope for where the treatment works, you've signed the death warrant for at least half of the study group who are in the control.
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The other thing here is that the ethicists are talking about a general situation, while this clearly was a special one and it is not hard in any way to see it was a special one. The journals that refused to publish were just cowardly avoiding the discussion. Definitely not run by the scientifically-minded.
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The ethical concerns are real and important. The current set of ethical requirements for research were arrived at through a lot of really bad things happening.
Consider, if you can avoid all the headache of getting ethics approval by self-experimentation, do you think that's an incentive for other researchers to experiment on themselves? Maybe an incentive for some 20 year old grad student to just try it out on themselves to make their supervisor happy?
And in the end, all you get is a case study. Scientifica
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I do think there is an ethical difference between doing an experiment on yourself, and doing one on another person. Still, even if you are a doctor, and nothing else has worked on such a person, the options for experimental treatment become more ethically acceptable.
I wish I could mod this up to 5 (Score:2)
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it was a return case, so her immune system wasn't capable of taking care of it just by itself.
This is a reasonable hypothesis, but certainly not proven by her experience.
science is empirical (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed. A major part of Science is smart people being fed up with some situation they face and trying to do something about it.
How is this not the exception? (Score:1)
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This is _very_ clearly an exception. The ones refusing to publish are just cowards and took the easy way out. Require a major discussion of the ethics that make clear it is a special situation, but publish. But that takes some stones. These have gotten rare. Many businesses have gotten very risk-aware.
Yawn (Score:1)
A sample size of 1 ... is valid here! (Score:2)
A well-documented experiment with a sample size of 1 is fully worth publishing, especially for hard to replicate and expensive experiments.
I mean conducting oncolytic virotherapy in-vivo isn't like observing coin flips or the value of 'g'.
It worked for Marshall and Warren. (Score:2)
They believed that stomachs ulcers could be caused by bacteria, specifically helicobacter pylori. Marshall deliberately infected himself, got ulcers and then cured them.
They got a Nobel prize.