Tech boss uses AI and ChatGPT to create cancer vaccine for his dying dog
The tale of this heartbroken tech entrepreneur, his tumour-riddled rescue dog and a cure for cancer has leading scientists astounded.
Natasha Bita
Education Editor
With 17 years of experience in machine learning and data analysis, Mr Conyngham is an AI pioneer – an electrical and computing engineer who co-founded Core Intelligence Technologies, and was a director for the Data Science and AI Association of Australia. Once UNSW handed him the genomic sequencing, for which he paid $3000, he got cracking to decipher the data.
“I went to ChatGPT and came up with a plan on how to do this,’’ he said. “The first step was to reach out to the university to get Rosie’s DNA sequenced. The idea is you take the healthy DNA out of her blood and then you take the DNA out of her tumour and you sequence both of them to see exactly where the mutations have occurred. It’s like having the original engine of your car and then a version of the engine 300,000km down the road – you can compare them and see where there’s damage.”
Once UNSW produced the DNA sequencing, Mr Conyngham “ran it through a whole bunch of different (data) pipelines to find those mutations, and then I used other algorithms to find drugs to treat the cancer’’.
Hounding the UNSW scientists for help, Mr Conyngham impressed them with his ingenuity and persistence. “What really convinced them is I just kept going and providing results,’’ he said. “It’s kind of like when you’re a student and you go to your teacher, and if you haven’t done your homework and you ask, ‘how do I do this?’ the teacher will tell you to ‘go away, you’re wasting my time’. But every single time I turned up to them, I did my homework.’’
Team Rosie identified an immunotherapy drug produced by an unidentified pharmaceutical company – but when they applied to use it, the drug manufacturer refused to supply it for compassionate use. “The wind went out of my sails,’’ Mr Conyngham said. “But fate sort of intervened’’.
Associate Professor Smith recalls that Rosie’s owner was “a bit bummed out … we chatted and that’s when I told him about mRNA vaccines, and he circled back and said, ‘Hey, Martin, can you tell me more about his mRNA stuff, is there something we could actually do?’’’
Custom vaccine
The genomics team reached out to Pall Thordarson, director of the prestigious UNSW RNA Institute. A pioneer in nanomedicine, the Icelandic professor used Mr Conyngham’s data, crunched down to a half-page formula, to create a bespoke mRNA vaccine for Rosie.
this is kind of a crazy story! the headline predictably understates the role of the scientists the guy worked with as well as his own expertise, but the article is great and it does seem pretty clear that he would never have been able to do it without LLMs
www.theaustralian.com.au/business/tec...
