Riddled with cancer, Rosie the rescue dog had only months to live, until her dogged owner collared a chatbot to collaborate with elite medical scientists in the quest for a cure.
Now the hi-tech teamwork has unleashed an experimental medicine that offers hope to human patients, by using mRNA vaccines in oncology.
Abandoned in bushland, eight-year-old Rosie found her forever home with Sydney tech entrepreneur Paul Conyngham, who adopted the staffy-shar pei cross from an animal shelter in 2019 – just in time for pandemic lockdowns.
Heartbroken when his fur-baby was diagnosed with a deadly mast cell cancer in 2024, Mr Conyngham threw thousands of dollars at veterinary chemotherapy and surgery, which slowed but failed to shrink the tumours. Now, after treatment with a custom mRNA cancer vaccine over the Christmas break, the tennis ball-sized tumour on Rosie’s hock has shrunk in half, in a recovery that has astounded researchers at the cutting-edge of human cancer treatments.
“It was like holy crap, it worked!’’ says Martin Smith, an associate professor of computational biology and director of the Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics at the University of NSW.
“It raises the question, if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to all humans with cancer? It gives hope to a lot of people, and it’s something we’re passionate about trying to chase up here.’’
‘We often get oddball queries’
In a tale of tenacity, Mr Conyngham used a chatbot to brainstorm possible cures for Rosie’s cancer – then harnessed artificial intelligence to process gigabytes of genetic data to create the blueprint for an mRNA vaccine.
Harnessing some of Australia’s most sought-after scientists to manufacture the vaccine in laboratories at the University of NSW, he then tracked down the only veterinary researcher with ethics approval to administer the experimental drug.
It was ChatGPT that suggested immunotherapy, pointing Mr Conyngham to the UNSW Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, where Associate Professor Smith still remembers the “weird” request. “We often get oddball queries, and this one was coming from a private individual looking to sequence his dog,’’ he recalls. “DNA sequencing is a way to profile the tumour and identify mutations that might be causing the disease.’’
The renowned researcher was reticent. “Usually we don’t support direct-to-consumer type DNA sequencing because while generating data for genomics is relatively easy for us, interrogating that data is really hard and challenging,’’ he said. “But Paul said, ‘No worries, I’m a data analyst and I’ll figure this out with the help of ChatGPT’.”
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’’.
At the Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, Associate Professor Smith was gobsmacked that this puppy lover with no background in biology had cracked the code. “Paul was relentless,’’ he said. “He called and told me he had analysed the data and found mutations of interest and then used AlphaFold (an AI program) to find the proteins that were mutated, and then identified potential targets and matched them to drugs, and he was wondering could I help him find someone to synthesise this compound that he’d identified. I’m like, ‘Woah, that’s crazy!’ I was motivated by his enthusiasm.’’
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 the first time a personalised cancer vaccine has been designed for a dog,’’ Professor Thordarson said. “This is still at the frontier of where cancer immunotherapeutics are – and ultimately, we’re going to use this for helping humans. What Rosie is teaching us is that personalised medicine can be very effective, and done in a time-sensitive manner, with mRNA technology.’’
Deployed in Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic, mRNA – short for messenger ribonucleic acid – is a molecule that instructs a cell to produce disease-fighting proteins. Oncologists are testing the technology in dozens of human clinical trials, but it is not yet part of mainstream cancer medicine. What Professor Thordarson finds most remarkable is that a data engineer with no background in biology managed to generate the mRNA recipe.
“He ran an algorithm to inform the design of the mRNA and sent it to us, and we made a little nanoparticle,’’ he said. “It’s democratising the whole process.’’
Ethical questions
Rosie’s vaccine was ready, but Mr Conyngham still needed ethics approval to use it.
“I had to do everything by the book because you can’t just willy-nilly create a vaccine in Australia,’’ he said. “The red tape was actually harder than the vaccine creation, and I was trying to get an Australian ethics approval to run a drug trial on Rosie. It took me three months, putting two hours aside every single night just typing up this 100-page document. But there was a second intervention of fate.’’
Half a world away, Mari Maeda, founder of the Canine Cancer Alliance in the US, came across a UNSW website item about Mr Conyngham’s quest for a cure. Eager to assist, Dr Maeda alerted Rachel Allavena, a canine immunotherapy professor at the University of Queensland’s School of Veterinary Science in the country town of Gatton.
“I run cancer research programs in dogs where we look at a lot of experimental immunotherapies, so I had ethics in place that would cover Paul’s type of vaccine,’’ Professor Allavena said.
“In my research group we have therapies that wake the dog’s immune systems up so they realise that the cancer is a bad thing, and fight it. But I wouldn’t know how to even begin designing something like this. It’s a much more technologically advanced one than I would normally develop myself. Paul’s obviously a super-smart guy … he’s been a real trailblazer in terms of where this technology can go.’’
Injections begin
The bespoke vaccine was cold-freighted to the Gatton laboratory, and Mr Conyngham drove 10 hours with Rosie for her first injection in December, followed by a booster shot last month and another due next week. “It’s definitely working,’’ Professor Allavena said. “When it happens that first time, it’s magical. Rosie’s cancer was really, really advanced but one tumour has shrunk quite a lot – probably halved. Even though it hasn’t completely disappeared, she’s so much more comfortable because the tumour was so big, and now the cancer’s shrunk away. Even the glossiness of her coat, she just looks a lot happier and healthier.
“This is the first time anyone’s ever done this therapy, but it won’t be too far down the line before we can have personalised therapies for individual pets.’’
Rosie’s response has inspired David Thomas, inaugural director of the UNSW Centre for Molecular Oncology, who is working on similar mRNA treatments for human patients.
“The striking thing about this is the idea of citizen science, where a punter in the street, with a computer science background, can use their skills in the scientific process,’’ Professor Thomas said. “That’s a very impressive thing.’’
Rosie’s recovery has been a howling success, with most of her tumours appear to melt away in a matter of weeks. “In December she had low energy because the tumours were creating a huge burden for her,’’ Mr Conyngham said. “Six weeks post-treatment, I was at the dog park when she spotted a rabbit and jumped the fence to chase it. I’m under no illusion that this is a cure, but I do believe this treatment has bought Rosie significantly more time and quality of life.’’
Next steps
Rosie’s devoted dog-dad is now working on a second vaccine targeted to attack one large tumour that did not respond to the initial treatment. The UNSW scientists started work on the genetic sequencing this week.
“I’m trying to do a second round of (DNA) sequencing to see if we can find why parts of the tumour didn’t respond,’’ he said. “There’s actually a chance that for some cancers, we can change it from being a terminal sentence to a manageable disease, because you can create treatments ahead of the mutations.’’
Rosie’s rescue has cost Mr Conyngham tens of thousands of dollars but he would spend it all again. “She’s been with me through a whole bunch of really tough times, giving unconditional love,’’ he said. “She’s my best mate.’’
Read related topics:Vaccinations
