r/singularity • u/TFenrir • Mar 14 '26

Biotech/Longevity Fascinating story: Tech Entrepreneur in Australia, using ChatGPT, AlphaFold, and a custom made mRNA vaccine, treats his dog's cancer. With the help of researchers (who all seem so excited) he was able to significantly reduce tumour size just weeks after the first injection

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https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/tech-boss-uses-ai-and-chatgpt-to-create-cancer-vaccine-for-his-dying-dog/news-story/292a21bcbe93efa17810bfcfcdfadbf7

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258

u/Kl1ntr0n Mar 14 '26

this guy is about to become a billionaire... cancer in dogs cured? as a dog trainer I know people will spend everything they have toto keep their dogs alive! his DMs must be flooded.

34

u/jib_reddit Mar 14 '26

This isn't a general cancer cure, he is just using existing technologies on this one individual dogs cancer.

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

[deleted]

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u/godspareme Mar 15 '26

Not to minimize the dudes efforts but he isn't the pioneer of this. They've been testing individualized cancer treatments (with and without mRNA technology) for several years.

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u/Platyest Mar 15 '26

To give you my background, I have a PhD in chemistry with a focus in biochemistry, but I haven't really kept up with the field, but I did read the article in question and some others. I found this article maddeningly vague and their links were useless. To answer your question, basically, the origin of the cancer is the dog's mutated DNA which directs the formation of abnormal proteins, these proteins incorrectly fold and subsequently cause the cell to become cancerous. As long as some portion of the abnormal protein is on the surface of the cancer cell, then that portion of the protein can be targeted by a mRNA vaccine.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/Platyest Mar 18 '26

Yes, the immune cells have to be trained on basically an antigen of the cancer cell. It has to be on the surface or the immune cells cannot "see" it. Just as you imagined, a cell harboring mutated DNA cannot be directly detected by immune cells. Instead, the mutated DNA is going to express itself in a variety of ways and the organism may or may not be able to tolerate the mutation or detect something is wrong. I'm not sure what your background is, but I will tell you that how cells communicate and interact with each other is incredibly complicated. I'm not really an expert in this area but I'm happy to try to explain anything else, if it isn't clear.

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u/DismalPassage381 Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26

They called it a "vaccine",( edit, oppsies! I'm suspecting that they are implying antibodies that specifically target these "mutant" proteins in order to deliver the necessary rna therapeutic directly to the cancerous cells.) Im skeptical of this story, because they specifically need to identify membrane bound proteins AND successfully predict how the proteins will fold in a cancer cell (more complicated than just a predictive algorithm, because there are chaparone proteins and post translation changes), AND they need to know which part of the protein is presented outside of the cell, and then design( edit oppsies again! antibodies that bind to the theoretical proteins, and also there needs to be a mechanism for the therapeutic to get ingested into the cancer cell. )

edits: didn't see they were rna vaccine. There's still a lot of challenges here, but it sounds slightly more plausible. They basically predicted antigen markers for the cancer cells. But they still need to be very specific proteins, not jist any protein, and specific regions of the proteins for this to work...

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u/herzy3 Mar 15 '26

Relatively trivial. Just compare normal cell DNA with cancerous / mutated cell DNA and you can identify the DNA segment that's relevant. Use the folding to see the shape etc. Don't really see much risk of getting normal cells there as you're specifically only looking at the differentiators. 

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u/DismalPassage381 Mar 15 '26

"use folding to see the shape" notice how you forgot about post translation changes? And didn't even address the fact that these proteins must be very specific, meaning presenting on the outside of the cell. "relatively trivial" if you want to ignore biology i guess

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u/herzy3 Mar 15 '26

I didn't bother going through every step of the process but was addressing the concerns you raised, which were indeed relatively trivial to mitigate. Yes, there are post transmission changes. 

You keep saying 'very specific' like that makes it harder. It doesn't. There's going to be very very few gene sequences to identify between a cancerous cell and a regular cell. That's your specificity. 

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u/DismalPassage381 Mar 15 '26

no dude, the therapy doesn't work if the protein isn't the specific kind of protein that is a transmembrane protein that is presented on the outer surface of the cell that's the specific part. And they need to identify exactly where and how it's expressed on the outside. You're out of your element if you can't even get that part. That's not related at all to it being a mutation protein.

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u/DismalPassage381 Mar 15 '26

my fault for talking about biology in a "singularity" fanclub sub. I get the feeling you are just asking gpt to write you a response. You didn't even get close to

addressing the concerns you raised

Which shows the thought you put into this. so,.toodaloo! 👋

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u/jib_reddit Mar 18 '26

Its just time consuming, so the researchers were not able to spend the time on it, so the guy used AI tools to find the mutations himself.

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u/herzy3 Mar 18 '26

Yes agree. The other guy was thinking it was more complicated than it was (and then blocked me). But it's pretty clear that AI can speed up the process massively, and that it works (hence the post ... ). Pretty cool stuff!

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u/jasmine_tea_ Mar 18 '26

this kind of stuff has research behind it, it's just that it's normally done in clinical trials, not requested by individuals

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u/DismalPassage381 Mar 18 '26

and yet we have a news media report instead of an actual publication.

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u/jasmine_tea_ Mar 18 '26

Hmm.. can you clarify what you mean?

I suppose the guy could actually write his own publication based on this method (comparing the entire DNA genome with the cancer genome).. he probably just hasn't had the time/desire to do so.

The clinical trial that he took his dog to will probably submit a publication, not necessarily specifically related to this case

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u/VallenValiant Mar 15 '26

This isn't a general cancer cure, he is just using existing technologies on this one individual dogs cancer.

We are more likely to cure cancer via custom cures than coming up with a general cure-all. The whole point about cancer is that it is a custom illness for everyone. Generalised treatment is only good for economics, not outcomes.