A Man Used ChatGPT and AlphaFold to Build His Dog a Cancer Vaccine

Paul Conyngham had no biology degree, spent $3,000 on DNA sequencing, and watched his dog's tumor shrink by more than half

Paul Conyngham didn’t go to medical school. He runs a machine learning consultancy in Sydney, spends most of his time with data pipelines and prediction models, and has no formal background in biology or oncology. But when his rescue dog Rosie was diagnosed with aggressive mast cell cancer in 2024 and given only months to live, he did something that most researchers would have called impossible for a non-specialist: he used AI to design her a custom cancer vaccine.

The tumor on Rosie’s back leg shrank by more than 50% within one month of her first injection. She is alive and, by all accounts, chasing rabbits again.

I’ve been covering generative AI for a while now, and I’ve watched it get applied to code generation, legal documents, financial modeling, and drug discovery at the institutional level. But this story cuts differently. It’s a single person, working mostly alone, who took tools that were publicly available and used them to do something that had never been done before for a dog. The implications for human medicine are hard to overstate.

The Dog Who Started It All

Rosie is a Staffordshire Bull Terrier and Shar Pei cross. Conyngham adopted her from a Sydney shelter in 2019, after she had been abandoned in bushland. He describes her as his closest companion through some of the hardest stretches of his life.

In 2024, large tumors appeared on one of her back legs. The diagnosis was mast cell cancer, the most common skin cancer in dogs and notoriously difficult to treat once it spreads beyond the initial site. Conyngham spent thousands of dollars on veterinary chemotherapy and surgical intervention. The treatments slowed the cancer. They did not shrink the tumors.

He started thinking about a different approach.

How ChatGPT Became a Biomedical Research Partner