Eight-year-old Rosie, suffering from mast cell cancer, is now in partial remission and her largest tumor has significantly decreased, her owner Paul Conyngham, an AI consultant in Sydney, revealed.
A daring gamble to save his condemned dog “She has regained a lot of mobility and activity” after receiving a personalized mRNA vaccine combined with powerful immunotherapy in December, he explained.
This long battle against Rosie’s cancer caught the attention of OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, who discussed this “incredible story” on Friday. This makes researchers believe in the potential of AI to accelerate medical research.
AI at the heart of the treatment “I constantly interacted with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok to deeply study cancer therapies,” Paul Conyngham explained. Following the chatbots’ advice, he spent $3,000 (2,600 euros) to sequence Rosie’s genome.
He used various online tools to analyze her DNA data, then turned to AlphaFold, a scientific AI model that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024, to understand one of her mutated genes better.
Thanks to a ChatGPT recommendation, he enlisted the help of a team from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and other Australian researchers to carry out his work.
Misdiagnosis For over a year, Rosie’s cancer was misdiagnosed, Paul Conyngham revealed during one of their daily walks. But Rosie’s condition worsened, and a biopsy in 2024 revealed she had terminal cancer.
A decisive scientific collaboration After trying chemotherapy, traditional immunotherapy, and surgery, Paul Conyngham sought other options. He turned to AI to explore emerging treatments, including mRNA vaccines, which boost the immune system and were widely used during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Promises of AI Chatbots helped Mr. Conyngham navigate the paperwork, and with his new scientific network, he met a University of Queensland professor to administer the treatment. But not all tumors responded as well as the largest one. Rosie had to undergo another surgery, and her prognosis is uncertain.
While it is unclear how AI specifically contributed to the development of the vaccine, the potential of AI in medical research is promising. “It’s like going from searching for a needle in a haystack to a data-driven selection process, significantly shortening the time between diagnosis and vaccine development and potentially aiding animals and humans in survival,” added Patrick Ming-kuen Tang, a professor at the University of Hong Kong.
