SYDNEY, March 31 \u2014 Desperate to help his sick dog, one Australian man went down the ultimate ChatGPT research hole, using artificial intelligence to design a personalised experimental treatment and finding top scientists to administer it.<\/p>\n
Paul Conyngham\u2019s months-long quest to fight his rescue mutt Rosie\u2019s cancer has grabbed the attention of OpenAI boss Sam Altman, who called it an \u201camazing story\u201d in an X post on Friday.<\/p>\n
Sydney-based AI consultant Conyngham told AFP that eight-year-old Rosie\u2019s mast cell cancer is now in partial remission and her biggest tumour has shrunk dramatically.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe regained a lot of mobility and function\u201d after receiving a custom mRNA vaccine along with powerful immunotherapy in December, he said.<\/p>\n
Conyngham does not call his findings a cure \u2014 but experts unrelated to the dogged endeavours said they highlight AI\u2019s potential to accelerate medical research.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would have conversations and just keep them going non-stop\u201d with ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok to study cancer therapies in-depth, Conyngham said.<\/p>\n
Following the chatbots\u2019 advice, he paid US$3,000 (RM12,066) to have Rosie\u2019s genome sequenced, and used the same online tools to analyse her DNA data.<\/p>\n
Next he turned to AlphaFold, a scientific AI model that won 2024\u2019s chemistry Nobel, to better understand one of the mutated doggy genes.<\/p>\n
Conyngham sought the help of a University of New South Wales (UNSW) team \u2014 also thanks to a ChatGPT recommendation \u2014 and other academics in Australia who made his research a reality.<\/p>\n
\u2018Just a rash\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rosie\u2019s cancer was misdiagnosed for nearly a year, Conyngham said on the phone during one of the long daily walks the pair have resumed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI took her to the vet three times. And two times, the vet said, don\u2019t worry about it, it\u2019s just a rash,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But Rosie got sicker and a biopsy showed in 2024 that she did have terminal cancer.<\/p>\n
Having tried chemotherapy, standard immunotherapy and surgery, costs were mounting and Conyngham wanted more options.<\/p>\n
So he used AI to delve deep into the world of emerging treatments including mRNA vaccines, which train the body\u2019s immune system and were widely used during the Covid pandemic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was not a clinical trial by any means\u201d and \u201cit\u2019s not that AI cured cancer\u201d, said UNSW professor Martin Smith, who sequenced Rosie\u2019s genome for Paul.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was really driven by his determination to help his dog.\u201d<\/p>\n
The combination of \u201cthree different disruptive technologies: genome sequencing, artificial intelligence, and RNA therapeutics… offers new possibilities and challenges\u201d, Smith said.<\/p>\n
AI promise\u00a0<\/p>\n
Chatbots also assisted Conyngham in navigating the reams of paperwork for ethical approval.<\/p>\n
And through his new scientific network, he met a professor at the University of Queensland able to administer the fine-tuned treatment.<\/p>\n
Not all the tumours responded as well as the largest one, however. Rosie has had to have another operation since, and it\u2019s unclear how long she has left to live.<\/p>\n
The \u201cshort answer is we don\u2019t know for sure\u201d what actually led to the reduction in size of Rosie\u2019s biggest tumour, said Pall Thordarson, director of UNSW\u2019s RNA institute which created the vaccine.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe used the AI program… to design the actual mRNA sequence. And then he gave that information to us,\u201d Thordarson explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI holds lots of promise to improve and accelerate our research strategies,\u201d Nick Semenkovich at the Medical College of Wisconsin, unrelated to the Rosie saga, told AFP.<\/p>\n
But UNSW and Conyngham \u201chaven\u2019t published scientific details outside of their press release and interviews, so we don\u2019t know enough about the vaccine to understand how much AI helped in its development \u2014 or if the vaccine worked the way it was designed\u201d, Semenkovich said.<\/p>\n
Patrick Tang Ming-kuen, a professor from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, said AI-powered research could help pets and humans survive, although the risk of errors is real.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI transforms a \u2018needle-in-a-haystack\u2019 search into a data-driven selection process, drastically shortening the timeframe between diagnosis and vaccine construction,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Since Conyngham\u2019s story went global, Smith said his team have been fielding various new requests.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know: my cat\u2019s got a disease, my dog\u2019s got a disease, my aunt has got a disease.\u201d<\/p>\n
But \u201cit\u2019s hard for us to be able to help\u201d, he said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of things that have to align.\u201d \u2014 Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SYDNEY, March 31 \u2014 Desperate to help his sick dog, one Australian man went down the ultimate ChatGPT…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,6223,254,255,64,63,5004,272630,91486,670,105,35926],"class_list":["post-576258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-research","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-chatgpt","tag-conyngham","tag-rosie","tag-sydney","tag-technology","tag-unsw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}