Late Friday, there was a story about an Australian tech entrepreneur named Paul Cunningham reducing the size of his dog Rosie's cancerous tumor by designing a custom mRNA vaccine with the help of ChatGPT, and it produced a substantial amount of discourse over the weekend, separating facts from the hype cycle around the story. Cunningham is an AGI pill tech guy with 17 years of experience in machine learning and data analysis, at one time being a director at a non-profit called the Data Science and AI Association of Australia. Talk about an incredible association.
We don't have enough data science and AI associations globally. It's true. It's great to hear that Australia...
His dog, Rosie, had been diagnosed with a deadly mast cell cancer in 2024. Cunningham used ChatGPT to brainstorm ways he could help, and he did an interview on this, and here's a quote from him. He said, "I went to ChatGPT and came up with a plan on how to do this. The first step was to reach out to the university to get Rosie's DNA sequenced." Is there not a 23andMe for dogs yet or something? Who's doing full genome sequencing these days? I guess dog DNA is probably a separate assay, separate process.
You could do it. Okay, well, anyway, he went to a university, probably for a good reason, probably got good data. He said, "The idea is you take the healthy DNA out of her blood and then you take the DNA out of her tumor 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 at 300,000 km down the road. You can compare them and see where there's damage." So, once the University of New South Wales produced the DNA sequencing, Mr. Cunningham ran it through a whole bunch of different data pipelines. So, this is something that we're going to go into throughout this story, is the question of how much was this "cure my dog cancer" one shot at don't make mistakes. I don't think anyone's saying that, but very quickly there was an incentive to amplify this into the hype, like this crazy story, and then there was also an incentive to de-hype this all the way, and the truth, of course, is in the middle. So, that's where we're going to get today.
Once the DNA sequence was produced, he ran it through a whole bunch of custom different data pipelines to find those mutations, and then used other algorithms to find drugs to treat the cancer. With the help of the University of New South Wales, Cunningham identified a pharmaceutical company that produces an immunotherapy drug that looked like a good candidate for Rosie. So, the drug already existed or was available, but the company refused to supply it to him because I don't think it was approved for this particular indication in this particular species. So, he was out of luck there. So, he then turned to, again, the University of New South Wales, their RNA Institute, which used Cunningham's data crunched down to a half-page formula to create a bespoke mRNA vaccine for Rosie. Again, from the story, Cunningham ran an algorithm to inform the design of the mRNA and sent it to us, and we made a little nanoparticle, and it's democratizing the whole process, they said. This was Paul Thordarson, the director of the RNA Institute at the University of New South Wales. So, after several months of navigating red tape, Cunningham and his team administered the vaccine to Rosie, which was effective. One of her tumors shrank by half, though she is not completely cured. And that's just kind of the nature of cancer. Like cells are dividing all the time. Everyone has some sort of low-level baseline of cancer. Most dogs have like a little bit. The question is, is it runaway? Is it bad? Is it terrible? And then it's hard to just snap your fingers and cure it completely, but if you get the amount of cancer down really, really far, then you will of course survive. So, the important thing is that Cunningham says the quality of life of the dog, Rosie, is much better now. So, on X news, the story turned into a heated debate on health regulation.
What is that? Air horn for Rosie. That's for the dog.
Air horn for the dog. That's great. Turned into a heated debate on health regulation after biomedical engineer Patrick Heiser posted that quote, "It is trivially easy, trivially, trivially easy to make a single-arm mRNA vaccine. It's not hard." And Hank Green, prominent YouTuber, issued something of a rebuttal, which we can go through later. A separate thread in the discourse is focused on the promise of LLMs democratizing access to medical science, with OpenAI president Greg Brockman quote-tweeting the story with the caption, "A small window into the opportunity of AGI." Well, Cunningham didn't literally cure Rosie's cancer, as Stripe CEO Patrick Collison pointed out. It acted as a high-powered search tool that ultimately helped his team get to an amazing outcome. Sort of George Hotz.
I think we got to... I'm ready to move them. We're moving the goalposts. I mean, where are we moving them to? It has to actually... You have to be able to type "cure my cancer" and then from your phone it just deposits a pill that you just take.
What it is? It has to locally, end to end.
No, ideally it would be not even a pill that you take. It can just create a video that you watch.
Pattern of light coming from and sound. So, the phone has light and sound, and so the light flashes in your eyes at a certain rate, it rewires your brain, and your brain decides to go kill the cancer.
Yeah. That's the... We've talked about this a bunch.
Yeah. I think it would be helpful for the industry to refocus some messaging on not "AI is going to cure cancer," but "humanity is going to use AI to cure cancer and do a number of other things," right? And so, the bar is not just like one-shotting it with a prompt and it sends it to a lab and you get some type of treatment in the mail. Maybe I can imagine that in the future, right? Something to that effect, but it is an enabler, it's a tool, and this has allowed someone to become not an expert in something, but to help somebody understand a process enough to go out and find the right experts to help them solve their problem, and I think it's incredibly inspiring. So, excited to have them on the show later.
There was a chemist who works in AI and biotech by the name of Ash Jogalekar, and he had a really good summary along those lines with a riff on Freeman Dyson's 2007 New York Review of Books essay "Our Biotech Future," which we should read at some point. In this article, Freeman Dyson argues that biotechnology will become small and domesticated rather than big and centralized. The full post is worth reading in full, and we might go through it, but the conclusion is particularly good. "If AI continues to reduce the cognitive overhead required to navigate biological knowledge and assemble complex pipelines, the boundary between professional research and motivated individuals may begin to blur. That shift will require careful thinking about safety, governance and responsibility, but it also carries an exciting possibility. Dyson imagined a world in which biological design might eventually become something like a creative craft practiced not only by institutions, but also by curious individuals experimenting at smaller scales." Yeah, I think there's the reality of cancer treatment, from my understanding, and this is based on a late family member that had cancer and ultimately passed away. During the process, during his treatment process, which was around a year and a half, he was getting looks at different treatments that were promising, some of which he was able to do, some he didn't qualify for just based on his personal situation, even though there was a decent chance that it could have had a positive effect.
