“An Australian tech entrepreneur claims he used AlphaFold and ChatGPT to design a customized mRNA cancer therapy for his dog. Working with scientists at the University of New South Wales, the treatment was produced and administered in a matter of months,” The Doomslayer says.
The Scientist reports:
Losing a beloved pet is difficult for anyone to accept, but an Australian tech entrepreneur refused to give up when his five-year-old rescue pup Rosie was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Turning to ChatGPT and AlphaFold, Paul Conyngham worked with scientists to create a personalized mRNA vaccine. ‘We took her tumor, we sequenced the DNA, we converted it from tissue to data, and then we used that to search for the problem in her DNA, and then developed a cure based on that,’ Rosie’s owner Paul Conyngham said in an interview with the Today Show Australia. “ChatGPT assisted throughout the entire process.”
What’s engaging about this, what’s so interesting, is that [Conyngham] used ChatGPT to identify the sequence and generate the RNA vaccine, then he ultimately was able to generate it pretty quickly and inject it,” said Steven Hsesheng Lin, a physician-scientist and radiation oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center who was not involved in the project. “So, from concept to translation to the actual patient—in this case, an animal patient—is astounding.”
Rosie had a tennis ball-sized mast cell tumor (MCT) on her leg…Rosie had already been treated with surgery and chemotherapy, but to no avail—veterinarians gave her just months to live.
More details at this link.
Personalized cancer vaccines could radically cut human death rates from skin cancer and breast cancer, according to The Guardian: “The world’s first personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma halves the risk of patients dying or the disease returning, according to trial results that doctors described as ‘extremely impressive.’ Melanoma affects more than 150,000 people a year globally…Patients who received the vaccine after having a stage 3 or 4 melanoma removed had a 49% lower risk of dying or the disease recurring after three years.”
Even if these medical advances save countless lives, government regulations may delay them from being used for years. The FDA can take years to approve vaccines, medical tests, and drugs. The FDA didn’t approve a home test for HIV until 24 years after it first received an application. According to an FDA advisory committee, the test held “the potential to prevent the transmission of more than 4,000 new HIV infections in its first year of use alone.” That means thousands of people likely got infected with AIDS as a result of the delay in approving it. At least a hundred thousand people died waiting years for the FDA to approve beta blockers.
