When your dog gets a death sentence, you try just about anything.
For Sydney tech entrepreneur Paul Conyngham, that meant taking his eight-year-old dog Rose’s tumour, turning it into data and asking whether artificial intelligence could help do what medicine had not: buy her more time.
Rose, a black staffy-shar pei mix, had terminal cancer when Conyngham decided to try building a custom RNA vaccine tailored to her disease. He worked with the genetics program at the University of New South Wales after sequencing the DNA in her tumour and feeding that information into ChatGPT to help identify what had gone wrong.
“Rose is my best mate and she’s been with me through really tough times,” Conyngham told Today Show Australia. “When she was handed this sentence, I felt I had to do my part for her as well.”
He said he sequenced the DNA in her tumour and “converted it from tissue to data,” then “used that to sort of search for the problem in her DNA.”
With help from ChatGPT and researchers at UNSW, Conyngham said they were able to identify the issue and develop an RNA vaccine aimed at Rose’s specific cancer.
The experiment was expensive, and Conyngham knew it was far from a sure thing.
“The price was $3000, which is probably beyond what most people would spend on this problem, but I thought screw it. It’s worth a shot,” he said in an article published by UNSW.
At first, even some of the scientists involved were not convinced the timeline would work.
Professor Pall Thordarson, director of the RNA Institute at UNSW, told Today Show Australia he was skeptical in the beginning.
“Mainly just I thought this might take too long, and I guess one of the things we learned from this process … the technology, even though we’ve been working similar MRNA for years, I just didn’t think we could do this this quickly, and it would be in time to really help Rosie,” Thordarson said. “So it’s just been an amazing project for us to be involved in.”
Once the team had the genetic sequence, the process moved fast.
“It was less than two months from that point, till we handed it over to Paul who took it to the vet to help her,” Thordarson said.
The vaccine did not eliminate the cancer completely. But Conyngham said it made a major difference.
“It’s added considerable lifespan and health,” he said.
According to Conyngham, the treatment “pushed back about 75% of the cancer. So, it shrunk it all down. There was just a little bit that didn’t respond.”
He said the change in Rose became visible after about a month.
“At the start of December, her mobility was way down. She started to shut down and be a bit sad,” Conyngham said. “Towards the end of January, she was jumping over a fence to chase a rabbit.”
Researchers say the case could point to broader medical uses for the same approach.
Thordarson said the work may have implications beyond veterinary care.
“We can also use it for other diseases, possibly … neurological diseases, for instance,” he said.
For now, Rose’s case remains a personal one before it is anything else: a dog owner refusing to give up, a research team moving faster than expected, and one custom-made shot that appears to have given a very good girl more time.
