Uncharted Territories

A researcher in virology and immunotherapy got bad news: Her cancer was back with a vengeance; the treatments weren’t working. It was growing and spreading. Traditional options wouldn’t work for her.

She had no professional experience with cancer, but she knew a lot about viruses and the immune system. Her scientific expertise suggested a potential cure: Some viruses can debilitate cancers. You might be able to inject them into your body to fight them off. The only problem? This treatment is not yet proven, and no drugs were approved for use on her cancer. So what did she do?

When I first read about this, I had so many questions: Why didn’t her prior treatments work? Why did she think those particular viruses would work against cancer? Why does she think the viruses worked? Why are there no available treatments that use this technique? What potential does it have? Why did so many journals reject the paper she wrote about her case?

Beata’s breast cancer was first diagnosed in 2016. It was a nasty tumor. 1 She underwent a mastectomy 2 and then underwent chemotherapy. Unfortunately, two years later the cancer returned, and it was as aggressive as the first. Doctors cut it out again. Then, in 2020, she discovered a new hard tumor, 2 cm in size (nearly an inch).

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