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A man with no biology degree just designed a custom cancer vaccine for his dog. It worked.
Paul Conyngham adopted Rosie knowing she had cancer and months to live. He decided that was unacceptable.
With no background in biology, he paid $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA, fed the data into AI tools, identified the mutated proteins driving her cancer, and designed a bespoke mRNA vaccine from scratch. When he called the Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics to find someone who could synthesize the compound he had identified, Associate Professor Smith was floored.
“Paul was relentless,” he said. “I was motivated by his enthusiasm.”
The vaccine was harder to approve than it was to build. Three months of bureaucracy. Two hours every night, alone, typing up a 100-page ethics document while his dog slept beside him. One person who just wanted his dog to live.
Rosie got her first injection in December. Conyngham drove 10 hours to get it to her. One tumor has already halved in size. Her coat is glossy. She looks, by every account, like a dog who is going to be fine.
The professor treating her put it simply: “If we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to all humans with cancer?”
One man, one chatbot, and $3,000. The entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline did not see this coming.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
theaustralian.com.au/business/techn…
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