A man used AI to create a cancer vaccine for his dog – an oncologist urges caution

An Australian tech entrepreneur has helped develop a seemingly tailor-made cancer vaccine for his dog Rosie, using artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.

The science behind it sounds intimidating – DNA sequencing, mRNA vaccines, “neoantigens” – but at its core it involves reading the instructions inside a tumor and then writing new instructions that help the immune system recognize them.

Rosie is an eight-year-old rescue Staffordshire bull terrier cross who was diagnosed with aggressive mast cell cancer, a common skin cancer in dogs. She had to undergo surgery and chemotherapy, but the disease kept coming back and she ended up with large, ugly tumors on her leg.

Veterinarians told her owner, Paul Conyngham, that she probably only had a few months to live. Instead of accepting that, he decided to take the tools he knew from his job in tech—data analysis, AI, and coding—and apply them to his dog’s cancer.

Decoding the tumor

The first…