A DIY Medical Miracle? How One Man Used ChatGPT to Help Create a Custom Cancer Vaccine for His Dog

A data engineer from Sydney used AI to design what may be the world’s first personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for a dog. Scientists who helped him are stunned.

BY AMAYA NICHOLE, NEWS WRITER

When tech entrepreneur Paul Conyngham found out that his dog Rosie had deadly mast-cell cancer, he was devastated. When chemotherapy and surgery didn’t work to shrink the tumors, the electrical and computing engineer who co-founded Core Intelligence Technologies, took matters into his own hands and turned to AI for help.

After giving OpenAI’s ChatGPT Rosie’s health information, it suggested immunotherapy and specifically recommended that he contact the doctors and researchers at the University of New South Wales Ramaciotti Center for Genomics. 

“The first step was to reach out to the university to get Rosie’s DNA sequenced. The idea is you take the healthy DNA out of her blood and then you take the DNA out of her tumour and you sequence both of them to see exactly where the mutations have occurred. It’s like having the ­original engine of your car and then a version of the engine 300,000km down the road—you can compare them and see where there’s damage,” he explained to the Australia’s Today.

When associate professor Martin Smith saw the work that Conyngham had already done, he was amazed. “He called and told me he had ­analyzed the data and found ­mutations of interest and then used AlphaFold (an AI program) to find the proteins that were ­mutated, and then identified ­potential targets and matched them to drugs, and he was ­wondering could I help him find someone to synthesise this compound that he’d identified. I’m like, ‘Woah, that’s crazy!’ I was motivated by his enthusiasm,’’ he told the Australian.

How Anthropic's Claude AI Became a Co-Founder

Things were looking up when Conyngham and the UNSW scientist—coined “Team Rosie”—found an immunotherapy produced by an unidentified pharmaceutical company. Yet, things took a turn when their request to use the drug was denied.

The team went back to the drawing board when Smith suggested that they create a mRNA vaccine. Conyngham was immediately interested and the process to create Rosie a custom vaccine began.

Creating a Custom Vaccine

Team Rosie contacted researcher and Director of the UNSW RNA Institute, Pall Thordarson who used Conyngham’s data, crunched down to a half-page formula, to create a bespoke mRNA vaccine for Rosie in less than two months.

© Inc.com