A virologist named Beata Halassy recently made headlines after publishing a report of successfully treating her own breast cancer by self-administering an experimental treatment.
Having previously undergone a mastectomy and chemotherapy, Halassy informed her doctors that she wanted to treat her tumour by injecting it with viruses known to attack cancerous cells. This sort of approach is called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT). OVT has not yet been approved for the treatment of breast cancer, but it is being studied as an experimental approach.
Halassy is a success story of self-experimentation in medicine. She joins other examples, like Barry Marshall, who won the 2005 Noble prize in medicine following his work ingesting the Helicobacter bacterium to prove its role in gastritis and peptic ulcers. This work is estimated to have saved millions of lives.
