[ExI] Virologist cures herself of breast cancer with a lab grown virus

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2024-11-21 09:57, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2024 at 4:56 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>> So somebody (allegedly) cures themselves of cancer, and all the fuss
>> is about "the ethics of self-experimentation".
> 
> Issue 1: did she actually cure herself?  Did she have cancer, does she
> now not have cancer, and are there any notable negative-to-her side
> effects?

Here is the documentation of her experiment:

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/12/9/958

She is a Croatian virologist at the University of Zagreb. She probably 
has her own lab and some graduate students and postdocs working with 
her. She got breast cancer in 2018 and had recurred several times after 
several rounds of conventional treatment. I imagine that it had become 
unresponsive to chemo and it had become invasive sending tendrils into 
her muscle tissue. She published her own case study as the senior author 
in "Vaccines" which is an official journal but it has a low impact 
rating. She does not have a lot of data, which is possibly why she did 
not publish it in a higher tier journal like Nature Medicine, but she 
probably also had an Eastern European-sized research budget.

She injected her invasive breast tumor with a measles vaccine (a live 
attenuated strain of the virus) twice a week for a month most likely to 
recruit a robust immune response in the tumor. Then she injected her 
tumor with vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), a cow virus that can make 
humans who work with cattle sick with flu-like symptoms but can't spread 
from person to person because healthy human cells make interferon which 
prevents it from replicating. But some cancers have mutated cells with 
defective interferon responses. VSV can replicate in these defective 
cancer cells and so selectively kills cancer cells due to their 
malfunctioning interferon response.

VSV has previously been used to selectively kill glioma brain tumors in 
mice.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6671450/

The pathology slides in her paper show a legitimate killer T-cell 
response in the tumor sections and lots of B-cell and macrophage 
activity. Her immune system was definitely attacking the tumor. When 
they surgically removed her tumor, it had lost its "tendrils" and become 
more smooth and flat shrinking to about 1/3 its original size and was no 
longer invading her muscle tissue.

The medical insurance industry standard for what is considered "curing 
cancer" is the patient surviving for 5 years without a recurrence or 
relapse. So we will have to wait and see. The data seems legit and 
promising, but very sparse.

> Issue 2: is the procedure well enough documented to allow replication,
> or will this result in a bunch of people poisoning themselves?  Not
> her fault, but still a potential problem.

The technique itself well-documented enough to reproduce. But it would 
not work with every type of cancer. Just the ones that have 
malfunctioning interferon responses. The problem with cancer has always 
been that it is not a single disease but many, based on different ways 
that cell replication can glitch and become uncontrolled. The trick is 
to figure out ways to selectively kill the malfunctioning cells and 
leave the healthy ones alive. Measles vaccine and VSV are relatively 
safe, but there is a small non-zero chance that VSV could mutate or be 
engineered to develop human-to-human infectivity. Of course the 
existence of antivaxxers, especially in government, could complicate 
definitions of safety. VSV is a widely used lab virus model and nobody 
has ever died of it that I know of.

> Those aside, yes, most of the talk about "ethics" in practice is
> about, "how dare that person take personal sovereignty over something
> that we are the self-appointed experts and masters of."

Agreed.

Stuart LaForge