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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.
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.
In 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.
The reason this case matters beyond one tumour is that it forced journals to decide a question they had avoided. The answer these authors give is not permission: it is that each case needs assessing against the values ethics committees exist to protect, and that a self-experimenter who expects to publish should seek review beforehand. For a reader the practical point is the one both papers make, that a published case is a record of what happened to one person and not an instruction.
One person, one tumour, one report, and it is not evidence that anyone should treat themselves. What it does contribute is unusually well documented: serial imaging through the course, a baseline biopsy and an excised specimen scored by the same pathology department, antibody titres, and a named protocol with doses. The design choices are the interesting part. Two different viruses in sequence to stay ahead of the antiviral antibody response, frequent dosing to keep infectious virus concentrated in the tumour, and the neoadjuvant setting rather than the late metastatic setting in which oncolytic viruses are normally tested. The result also cannot be attributed to the viruses alone: the tumour was surgically removed and a year of trastuzumab followed, and the phenotype change to HER2 3+ is itself a plausible reason the disease behaved differently this time.
Shares The self-experiment: a virologist treated her own recurrent breast cancer with two viruses she made in her own laboratory, Oncolytic viruses, Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).
Shares Oncolytic viruses and the tag oncolytic-virus.
Shares Oncolytic viruses and the tag oncolytic-virus.
Shares Oncolytic viruses and the tag oncolytic-virus.
Shares Oncolytic viruses and the tag oncolytic-virus.
Shares Oncolytic viruses and the tag oncolytic-virus.
Shares Oncolytic viruses and the tag oncolytic-virus.
Shares Oncolytic viruses, Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).