{"entity":{"id":"beata-halassy","kind":"person","name":"Beata Halassy","aka":[],"tldr":"Beata Halassy is a Croatian virologist who grows and characterises viruses, and is the senior author of a 2024 case report of self-experimental oncolytic virotherapy.","summary":"Beata Halassy works at the Centre for Research and Knowledge Transfer in Biotechnology at the University of Zagreb and at the Centre of Excellence for Virus Immunology and Vaccines. Her published work spans virus production and purification, vaccine and antivenom manufacturing and quality, and immunology, with more than seventy works listed on her ORCID record, including studies of snake antivenom pharmacokinetics, virus-like particle vaccine candidates, and the purification of vesicular stomatitis virus.\n\nIn 2024 she was the senior and corresponding author of a case report in Vaccines describing self-experimental neoadjuvant oncolytic virotherapy in recurrent breast cancer, using an Edmonston-Zagreb measles vaccine strain and a vesicular stomatitis virus Indiana strain prepared in her own laboratory. The report is the patient's own published account: she is both an author and the subject, and the paper's ethics statement explains how the case was handled. It became the starting point for a wider argument about whether journals should publish self-experimentation, taken up by bioethicists in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2026. The case report's own conclusion states that self-medicating with oncolytic viruses should not be a first approach to a diagnosed cancer. She disclosed becoming a consultant to Vyriad in 2021 and a European patent application covering the subject matter.","asOf":"2026-09-25","links":[{"label":"ORCID","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7370-0997"},{"label":"PubMed","url":"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Halassy%20B%5BAuthor%5D"},{"label":"University of Zagreb","url":"https://www.unizg.hr/"}],"tags":["virology","oncolytic-virus","croatia"],"related":[],"cancers":["tnbc"],"sections":[],"technologies":["oncolytic-virus"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":["dubravko-forcic"],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":["paper-halassy-self-experiment-ovt-vaccines-2024","paper-pugh-self-experimentation-publication-jme-2026"],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"role":"Virologist, Centre for Research and Knowledge Transfer in Biotechnology, University of Zagreb; Centre of Excellence for Virus Immunology and Vaccines, Zagreb","specialisms":["Virology","Vaccine and antivenom production","Oncolytic virotherapy","Bioprocess development"],"profiles":[{"label":"ORCID","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7370-0997"},{"label":"PubMed","url":"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Halassy%20B%5BAuthor%5D"},{"label":"University of Zagreb","url":"https://www.unizg.hr/"}],"papers":[{"title":"An unconventional case study of neoadjuvant oncolytic virotherapy for recurrent breast cancer","journal":"Vaccines","year":2024,"doi":"10.3390/vaccines12090958"},{"title":"Native elution immunoaffinity chromatography for the efficient purification of vesicular stomatitis virus","journal":"Journal of Chromatography A","year":2026,"doi":"10.1016/j.chroma.2026.467294"},{"title":"Production- and purification-relevant properties of human and murine cytomegalovirus","journal":"Viruses","year":2021,"doi":"10.3390/v13122481"}],"orcid":"0000-0001-7370-0997"},"route":"/people/beata-halassy/","neighbours":{"cancer":[{"id":"tnbc","kind":"cancer","name":"Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC)","route":"/cancers/tnbc/"}],"technology":[{"id":"oncolytic-virus","kind":"technology","name":"Oncolytic viruses","route":"/technologies/oncolytic-virus/"}],"person":[{"id":"dubravko-forcic","kind":"person","name":"Dubravko Forcic","route":"/people/dubravko-forcic/"}],"paper":[{"id":"paper-pugh-self-experimentation-publication-jme-2026","kind":"paper","name":"Pugh 2026: should a journal publish a scientist's experiment on herself?","route":"/key-papers/paper-pugh-self-experimentation-publication-jme-2026/"},{"id":"paper-halassy-self-experiment-ovt-vaccines-2024","kind":"paper","name":"The self-experiment: a virologist treated her own recurrent breast cancer with two viruses she made in her own laboratory","route":"/key-papers/paper-halassy-self-experiment-ovt-vaccines-2024/"}]}}