Sitaraman Shankar

The anti-Schrodinger experiment

A tech consultant in Sydney spent $3,000 and two months to do what Moderna has spent billions trying to scale. Paul Conyngham adopted Rosie, a staffy-Shar Pei cross, from a shelter in 2019. In 2024, tumors started growing on her back leg. Mast cell cancer, the most common skin cancer in dogs. He tried surgery, chemo, immunotherapy. Nothing shrank the tumors. Just slowed them down while the bills stacked into the tens of thousands. So he opened ChatGPT and asked it how to cure his dog’s cancer. The AI didn’t cure anything. What it did was compress months of literature review into hours. It suggested genomic sequencing, walked him through neoantigen identification, helped him build a research pipeline that would normally require a postdoc and a lab budget. He paid $3,000 to sequence Rosie’s tumor DNA at UNSW’s Ramaciotti Centre, then ran the mutations through AlphaFold to model the protein structures. A computational biology professor at UNSW saw his analysis and was, in his own words, gobsmacked that someone with zero biology training had assembled the whole thing. Then came the part nobody expects. The science was the easy half. Australian ethics approval to run a drug trial on your own pet took three months. Two hours every night after work, filling out a 100-page application. The red tape was harder than designing the vaccine. Once he cleared that, Páll Thordarson at the UNSW RNA Institute built a custom mRNA vaccine from Conyngham’s data. Sequencing to finished vaccine: less than two months. Conyngham drove 10 hours to deliver Rosie for her first injection in December. One month later, the tennis-ball-sized tumor on her leg had shrunk 75%. Here’s where the numbers get interesting. Moderna and Merck just reported five-year data on their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma. It encodes up to 34 neoantigens per patient. The Phase III trial is fully enrolled. Projected cost per patient: $100,000 to $300,000. Their pipeline is worth an estimated $2.3 billion in annual sales by 2031. Conyngham did a version of the same workflow for his dog. Sequenced the tumor. Identified the neoantigens. Built a custom mRNA construct. Total cost: $3,000 for sequencing plus university lab time. The gap between those two numbers is where AI is about to rearrange the entire cost structure of precision medicine. The regulatory moat is real. Conyngham could do this because veterinary experimental treatments face lighter scrutiny than human medicine. There’s no FDA Phase I-III gauntlet for a one-off compassionate use case on a dog. But the technical workflow, tumor sequencing to neoantigen prediction to mRNA synthesis, is converging toward something a motivated person with the right AI tools can orchestrate in weeks instead of years. One guy, a rescue dog, and a $20/month ChatGPT subscription just produced a proof of concept that the pharmaceutical industry has spent a decade and billions of dollars building toward. The vaccine worked. The tumor shrank. And the only reason it happened is because a dog owner loved his dog enough to spend three months fighting paperwork.

Not knocking Pakistan's great batting performance, but if you had to pick an opponent for a game like this, this Lankan side would be the one -- look pretty miserable in the field #SLvsPAK #T20WorldCup

Thanks @diljith_kannan for incisive questions interspersed with friendly fire. Extracted learnings from my 32 years of work life, from the chem production shop floor to my job at IIM-B with plenty of media experience and some coaching practice thrown in linkedin.com/posts/sitarama…

The only thing the fourth Ashes Test proves about #Bazball is that it still works in a low-stakes, low-target crapshoot situation #Ashes2025

High-quality news and analysis is certainly worth paying for. Especially if you consider the alternatives

Enjoyable session, got to interact with the media tribe again!

@themanipurbrief @UndisputedChanu @DeccanHerald @SumirDH Ok

@UndisputedChanu @DeccanHerald @SumirDH @shankarsview Small request to pass on this message politely to DH family if you are no longer with TPML @shankarsview 🙏

@themanipurbrief @UndisputedChanu @DeccanHerald @SumirDH I left more than a year ago

@UndisputedChanu @DeccanHerald @SumirDH If you are still running DH @shankarsview kindly see whether one of your reporters is being intentionally careless about a very sensitive issue in Manipur. It is sad to see DH name and legacy pounded like this all because of misbehaviour by one reporter. Thank you 🙏

From what I know of the author, this'll be a good one

Incredibly petulant behaviour from @benstokes38, 'offering' a draw to India when England couldn't break through, and then trying to devalue centuries by @Sundarwashi5 and @imjadeja by getting 'filth' bowled to them. Disappointing #ENGvIND

Enrolling now for the next cohort of our online Professional Certificate in Hospital Management. It's been a hit with the best in the business. @iimbxonline m.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_WwY…

Nice one, this linkedin.com/posts/shobhana…

@HarshadOke @GautamGambhir Bumrah and Kuldeep. And play six batsmen, so Sai instead of Reddy

@shankarsview @GautamGambhir @shankarsview what’s your view?

Funny how seemingly everybody in the world other than the Indian team management @GautamGambhir knows that they've got the selection badly wrong. Happened in Australia as well #INDvsENG

So Rishabh Pant has more hundreds in England than Gavaskar & Kohli, as many in South Africa as Sehwag & Pujara, and the same in Australia as Dravid & Ganguly, all this before even playing 50 Tests, which is less than half the Tests all those names have played. Madness, this guy!

Spent a couple of hours at our excellent National Museum on a visit to Delhi and came across this 1971 surrender document. A useful reminder, in completely different ways, for our neighbours to the east and west #IndiaPakistan #Bangladesh

This is lovely

Impressive graphic, and impressive performance down south

✍️ 'India great transformed Test cricket and his passion for format will keep the flame burning for future generations' | Writes @MichaelVaughan Read the column ⬇️ telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2025/0…