She Successfully Treated Her Own Cancer Using A Virus She Grew in The Lab

Recently, Nature reported on the headlines of its official website a special case of a virologist who used a virus she cultivated in the laboratory to treat her own cancer.

In 2020, 49-year-old Beata Halassy found that her breast cancer had recurred again, and she could no longer face a new round of chemotherapy.

Beata was first diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), the most aggressive and deadly subtype of breast cancer, in 2016. She subsequently underwent surgical resection and adjuvant chemotherapy. In 2018, local recurrence of cancer occurred at the surgical resection site, and the recurrence was surgically removed. However, there was still a small seroma after the surgical resection, which required regular monitoring. In 2020, phase contrast magnetic resonance imaging showed that the seroma structure had developed into a solid tumor with a diameter of 2 cm, and skin infiltration had occurred.

At this time, Beata had no good treatment options. As a virologist at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, she decided to take matters into her own hands after studying the literature and using an unproven therapy in breast cancer, Oncolytic Virotherapy (OVT). She wrote a paper on how she self-implemented oncolytic virotherapy and the results of the treatment, which was published in the journal Vaccines.

Oncolytic viruses (OVs) are a promising treatment for solid tumors. Once injected into a tumor, oncolytic viruses selectively target cancer cells without affecting normal cells, and replicate within cancer cells, causing them to lyse. In addition, oncolytic viruses can further stimulate the immune system, so they can be used in combination with other cancer immunotherapies, such as immune checkpoint inhibitors. Currently, a total of four oncolytic virus therapies have been approved for marketing, and they are injected into tumors to treat several cancers, including melanoma, colorectal cancer, and glioma. However, to date, no oncolytic virus therapies have been approved for the treatment of breast cancer at any stage.

Beata is not an oncolytic virus expert, but her expertise in culturing and purifying viruses in the laboratory gave her the confidence to try oncolytic virus therapy. She chose two different oncolytic viruses - measles virus (MeV) and vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). Both viruses can infect the cell types from which her tumors originated and have been used in clinical trials for oncolytic virus therapy.

Beata had previous experience in culturing these two viruses, and both viruses have a good safety profile. Measles strains are widely used in childhood measles vaccines, while vesicular stomatitis virus only induces mild flu-like symptoms in the worst case.

With the help of her colleagues, Beata injected two oncolytic viruses she cultivated in the laboratory (research grade only, not clinical grade) directly into the tumor and performed multiple injections over a period of 2 months. Her oncologist monitored her during her self-treatment and stopped oncolytic virus therapy and switched to conventional chemotherapy if any problems arose. As shown in Figure 1, she received 7 injections of MeV over a 3-week period and 3 injections of VSV before surgical removal of the tumor. Two months after the surgical removal of the tumor, she received another injection of MeV subcutaneously around the surgical sutures as a preventive adjuvant treatment.

Figure 1. Oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) protocol and outcomes. (Forčić D, et al., 2024)

This self-administered oncolytic viral therapy appears to be effective. In just 2 months of treatment, the tumor volume significantly shrank from 2.47 cm3 to 0.91 cm3. The tumor changed from a hard, fixed nodule with cutaneous inflammation to a soft, mobile nodule without cutaneous inflammation, and there was regression of the aggressive margins of the tumor. Injecting the oncolytic virus was extremely difficult at the beginning of treatment, but by the end of the treatment, the tumors had softened significantly, making the injection easier. Furthermore, the treatment was well tolerated and no serious side effects occurred.

Analysis of the surgically removed tumors revealed a thorough infiltration of lymphocytes in the tumors, suggesting that the oncolytic virus primed the immune system to attack the virus and tumor cells as expected. CD20-positive B cells increased from 10% to 70%, CD8-positive T cells increased from 30% to 60%, and infiltration of macrophages (CD68-positive cells) also increased. In addition, after oncolytic virus treatment, the tumors changed from PD-L1 negative to PD-L1 positive. After surgery to remove the tumor, Beata received a year of treatment with trastuzumab, an anti-Her2 monoclonal antibody used to treat metastatic breast cancer.

Figure 2. Imaging evidence of the effect of oncolytic virotherapy (OVT). (Forčić D, et al., 2024)

After first being diagnosed in 2016, Beata experienced her first relapse of triple-negative breast cancer 22 months later, and her second relapse 21 months later. After oncolytic virotherapy, she has been in remission for 45 months without relapse. Although this is an isolated case, it encourages consideration of oncolytic virotherapy as a neoadjuvant treatment.

Figure 3. Beata Halassy, PhD

Beata felt a responsibility to publish this discovery, and she wrote a paper about her treatment process, but it was rejected by more than a dozen journals. The main reason for the rejection was that the journal editor believed that publishing this paper might encourage other cancer patients to give up conventional treatment and try similar methods, because cancer patients are particularly prone to trying unproven treatments. At her insistence, the paper was finally published in the journal Vaccines, titled "An Unconventional Case Study of Neoadjuvant Oncolytic Virotherapy for Recurrent Breast Cancer".

Reference

Forčić D, et al. An Unconventional Case Study of Neoadjuvant Oncolytic Virotherapy for Recurrent Breast Cancer. Vaccines, 2024, 12(9): 958.