AI-designed dog cancer vaccine

1:59was riddled with tumors and dying. And he used ChatGPT to design a custom cancer vaccine, which is stunning researchers. This is a He's a Sydney tech entrepreneur, no background Mhm. uh in sort of this research area of oncology. >> Yeah. Uh used ChatGPT and some other AI tools to design a world's first personalized cancer vaccine for his dying rescue dog Rosie, who had advanced mast cell cancer. And then working with the University of New South Wales, they sequenced the dog's DNA, identified the cancer mutations using AI, and created the custom mRNA vaccine that shrank the

2:41tennis ball-sized tumor by 75% within months. This is fascinating. >> incredible story. And I mean, we've covered AI a lot on our podcast. And usually it's all been doom and gloom. But, you know, one of the things that gets me excited about AI is this I is this idea of the democratization of science and the democratization of technology and capability. And this is a spectacular example Right. of what it's capable of in the right hands. I think that's so cool. So, there was a Sydney tech entrepreneur, Paul Cunningham, and his rescue dog Rosie. The rescue dog

3:22Rosie had months to live. And he just did not accept that prognosis from the veterinarians. So, what he did was use ChatGPT to build a personalized cancer vaccine. It's pretty incredible. He had no, as you were saying, no background in biology, just 17 years as a machine learning engineer. So, reasonably tech savvy, Sure. reasonably has probably a first principles background of how stuff works at the DNA level. And here's what he did, okay? So, first always you go to chemotherapy. Chemotherapy slowed down the spread, but you know, it couldn't actually shrink the tumors of his dog. So, he spent

4:03$3,000 to have Rosie's healthy DNA sequenced, and then the tumor DNA sequenced as well. Okay. From the University of New South Wales. They've got, you know, biomedical labs, so they can do this. And then now that you have the DNA sequencing of what normal cells in his dog look like, and what the cancer cells in his dog look like, you can find mismatches Mhm. of where the cancer mutations are. Yep. Okay? And then he used the mRNA vaccine, which is the same vaccine that Moderna um sort of pioneered for COVID-19. The technology is the following. You insert a piece of mRNA

4:43that then gives your body a blueprint of what to look for in order to have that immune response. Mhm. Right? So, in the COVID-19 vaccine, the mRNA is for the spike protein on the COVID virus. The mRNA goes into our body, our body then translates that mRNA into protein, makes the spike protein. Our body then creates antibodies that