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Desperate to help sick dogs, an Australian man dives into the ultimate ChatGPT research hole to find top scientists who use artificial intelligence to design and administer personalized experimental treatments.
Paul Conyngham’s months-long efforts to fight cancer in his rescue dog Rosie caught the attention of OpenAI boss Sam Altman, who called it an “incredible story” in Friday’s X-Post.
Mr Conyngham, a Sydney-based AI consultant, said eight-year-old Rosie’s mast cell cancer is now in partial remission and her largest tumor has shrunk dramatically.
After receiving a custom mRNA vaccine along with powerful immunotherapy in December, “she has regained significant mobility and function,” he said.
Conyngham did not claim his discovery was a cure, but experts not connected to the persistent effort said they emphasized the potential of AI to accelerate medical research.
“We were having conversations nonstop” with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, Conningham said.
Following the chatbot’s advice, he paid $3,000 to have Rosie’s genome sequenced and used the same online tool to analyze her DNA data.
He then turned to AlphaFold, a scientific AI model that won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to better understand one of the dogs’ mutated genes.
Mr Conyngham enlisted the help of a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and other Australian academics who made his research a reality, also thanks to ChatGPT’s recommendation.
“Just a rash”
Rosie’s cancer had been misdiagnosed for nearly a year, Conyngham said by phone as the couple resumed their long daily walks.
“I took her to the vet three times, and twice the vet said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a rash,'” he said.
However, Rosie’s condition worsened, and in 2024, a biopsy revealed that she had terminal cancer.
Chemotherapy, standard immunotherapy and surgery were tried, but they were expensive and Conyngham wanted more options.
There, he used AI to train the body’s immune system and delved into the world of emerging treatments such as mRNA vaccines, which were widely used during the coronavirus pandemic.
Professor Martin Smith from UNSW University, who sequenced Rosie’s genome for Paul, said: “This is by no means a clinical trial” and “AI has not cured cancer.”
“It was really driven by his determination to help his dog.”
“The combination of three different disruptive technologies – genome sequencing, artificial intelligence and RNA therapeutics – presents new possibilities and challenges,” Smith said.
The promise of AI
The chatbot also helped Conyngham navigate the extensive paperwork for ethics approval.
Through a new scientific network, I met a professor at the University of Queensland who was able to provide detailed treatment.
However, not all tumors were as responsive as the largest tumors. Rosie will then have to undergo another surgery and her life expectancy is unknown.
Paul Thorderson, director of the RNA Institute at UNSW, which developed the vaccine, said: “Simply put, we don’t know for sure” what actually led to the reduction in the size of Rosie’s largest tumor.
“He used an AI program to…design the actual mRNA sequence, and he gave us that information,” Thorderson explained.
Nick Semenkovic of the Medical College of Wisconsin said that, unrelated to Rosie’s story, “AI has great potential to improve and accelerate our research strategies.”
But UNSW and Conyngham “have not published any scientific details beyond press releases and interviews, so we don’t know enough about the vaccine to understand how much AI contributed to its development or whether the vaccine worked as designed,” Semenkovic said.
Professor Patrick Tan Min-kuen from the Chinese University of Hong Kong said research using AI could help pets and humans survive, but the risk of error was real.
“AI will transform the search for a ‘needle in a haystack’ into a data-driven selection process, significantly shortening the time from diagnosis to vaccine development,” he said.
Since Conyngham’s story spread around the world, Smith said his team has responded to a variety of new requests.
“You know, my cat is sick, my dog is sick, my aunt is sick.”
But “it’s difficult for us to help,” he says. “There are a lot of things we have to adjust to.”
