{"id":225701,"date":"2026-03-20T10:17:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T14:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/20\/a-man-used-ai-to-help-make-a-cancer-vaccine-for-his-dog-an-oncologist-urges-caution\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T11:00:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T15:00:15","slug":"a-man-used-ai-to-help-make-a-cancer-vaccine-for-his-dog-an-oncologist-urges-caution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/20\/a-man-used-ai-to-help-make-a-cancer-vaccine-for-his-dog-an-oncologist-urges-caution\/","title":{"rendered":"A man used AI to help make a cancer vaccine for his dog \u2013 an oncologist urges caution"},"content":{"rendered":"

A man used AI to help make a cancer vaccine for his dog \u2013 an oncologist urges caution<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/theconversation.com\/a-man-used-ai-to-help-make-a-cancer-vaccine-for-his-dog-an-oncologist-urges-caution-278735<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-03-20 10:17:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: theconversation.com<\/a><\/p>\n

An Australian tech entrepreneur has helped create what appears to be a made-to-measure cancer vaccine for his dog, Rosie, using artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT as part of the process. <\/p>\n

The science behind this sounds intimidating \u2013 DNA sequencing, mRNA vaccines, \u201cneoantigens\u201d \u2013 but at its core, it is about reading the instructions inside a tumour and then writing a new set of instructions to help the immune system see it.<\/p>\n

Rosie is an eight-year-old rescue Staffordshire bull terrier cross that developed aggressive mast cell cancer, a common skin cancer in dogs. She had surgery and chemotherapy, but the disease kept coming back and she ended up with large, ugly tumours on her leg. <\/p>\n

Vets told her owner, Paul Conyngham, that she probably had only months to live. Instead of accepting that, he decided to use the tools he knew from his day job in tech \u2013 data analysis, AI and coding \u2013 and apply them to his dog\u2019s cancer.<\/p>\n

Decoding the tumour<\/h2>\n

The first step was to understand what made Rosie\u2019s tumour different from her healthy cells. <\/p>\n

Every cell in the body carries DNA \u2013 a long, chemical molecule that acts like a biological instruction manual. You can think of DNA as a very long string of letters written in a four-letter alphabet. Cancer happens when enough of those letters change, by chance or through damage, so that some cells start to grow and divide out of control. <\/p>\n

Sequencing a tumour\u2019s or normal cell\u2019s DNA is essentially reading through that long string of letters and comparing it to the \u201cnormal\u201d version to see where it has gone wrong. A lot of my own research has focused on this. Conyngham paid a university lab to sequence the DNA from Rosie\u2019s tumour. That produced a huge file listing the mutations \u2013 the spelling mistakes in the cancer\u2019s instruction manual \u2013 that set her tumour apart from her healthy tissues. <\/p>\n

On their own, those files are just data. The question is what to do with them. This is where he…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A man used AI to help make a cancer vaccine for his dog \u2013 an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":225702,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/725245\/original\/file-20260320-57-jn02z6.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&rect=0%2C21%2C9000%2C4500&q=45&auto=format&w=1356&h=668&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-225701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225701"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225703,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225701\/revisions\/225703"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}