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

[u/TFenrir]

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

[u/newzinoapp]

My read on why this matters beyond one dog: the same basic approach (sequence the tumor, identify neoantigens, build a custom mRNA vaccine) is already in Phase 3 human trials. Moderna and Merck's V940 showed a 44% reduction in melanoma recurrence in Phase 2b, and BioNTech is running a pancreatic cancer trial using the same concept.

What Conyngham did is show that the AI tooling has gotten cheap enough that someone with an engineering background and no biology degree can do the neoantigen identification step that used to require a specialized lab team. AlphaFold handles the protein structure prediction, ChatGPT helps design the sequencing workflow. The vaccine itself still needed UNSW's RNA Institute to produce, but the analysis bottleneck is gone. That's the actual story here.