Tech entrepreneur creates personalised cancer vaccine for dog Rosie | NATASHA BITA & Natasha Bita, The Australian Tech boss uses AI and ChatGPT to create cancer vaccine for his dying dog The tale of this heartbroken tech entrepreneur, his tumour-riddled rescue dog and a cure for cancer has leading scientists astounded. Riddled with cancer, Rosie the rescue dog had only months to live, until her dogged owner collared a chatbot to collaborate with elite medical scientists in the quest for a cure. Now the hi-tech teamwork has unleashed an experimental medicine that offers hope to human patients, by using mRNA vaccines in oncology. Abandoned in bushland, eight-year-old Rosie found her forever home with Sydney tech entrepreneur Paul Conyngham, who adopted the staffy-shar pei cross from an animal shelter in 2019 – just in time for pandemic lockdowns. Heartbroken when his fur-baby was diagnosed with a deadly mast cell cancer in 2024, Mr Conyngham threw thousands of dollars at veterinary chemotherapy and surgery, which slowed but failed to shrink the tumours. Now, after treatment with a custom mRNA cancer vaccine over the Christmas break, the tennis ball-sized tumour on Rosie’s hock has shrunk in half, in a recovery that has astounded researchers at the cutting-edge of human cancer treatments. “It was like holy crap, it worked!’’ says Martin Smith, an associate professor of computational biology and director of the Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics at the University of NSW. “It raises the question, if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to all humans with cancer? It gives hope to a lot of people, and it’s something we’re passionate about trying to chase up here.’’ ‘We often get oddball queries’ In a tale of tenacity, Mr Conyngham used a chatbot to brainstorm possible cures for Rosie’s cancer – then harnessed artificial intelligence to process gigabytes of genetic data to create the blueprint for an mRNA vaccine. Harnessing some of Australia’s most sought-after scientists to manufacture the vaccine in laboratories at the University of NSW, he then tracked down the only veterinary researcher with ethics approval to administer the experimental drug. It was ChatGPT that suggested immunotherapy, pointing Mr Conyngham to the UNSW Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, where Associate Professor Smith still remembers the “weird” request. “We often get oddball queries, and this one was coming from a private individual looking to sequence his dog,’’ he recalls. “DNA sequencing is a way to profile the tumour and identify mutations that might be causing the disease.’’ The renowned researcher was reticent. “Usually we don’t support direct-to-consumer type DNA sequencing because while generating data for genomics is relatively easy for us, interrogating that data is really hard and challenging,’’ he said. “But Paul said, ‘No worries, I’m a data analyst and I’ll figure this out with the help of ChatGPT’.” With 17 years of experience in machine learning and data analysis, Mr Conyngham is an AI pioneer – an electrical and computing engineer who co-founded Core Intelligence Technologies, and was a director for the Data Science and AI Association of Australia. Once UNSW handed him the genomic sequencing, for which he paid $3000, he got cracking to decipher the data. ...