The future of Veterinary Medicine: A Tech Entrepreneur makes a custom cancer drug for his dog with AI

When vets told Paul Conyngham that his dog Rosie had only months to live, he refused to accept it. What followed was one of the most remarkable stories at the intersection of artificial intelligence, genomics, and love for a pet, a story that has stunned researchers, captivated the tech world, and raised profound questions about the future of personalized medicine.

Rosie is an eight-year-old rescue Staffordshire bull terrier cross who 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 tumors on her leg. Her veterinarians delivered a crushing verdict: she likely had only months to live.

Conyngham is a Sydney-based tech entrepreneur — an electrical and computing engineer who co-founded Core Intelligence Technologies and served as a director of the Data Science and AI Association of Australia. He had no medical background. But he had something else: a deep familiarity with data, and an unwillingness to give up.

Conyngham turned to ChatGPT, a large language model that learns patterns from vast amounts of training data. Based on the AI chatbot's recommendation, he reached out to the Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics at UNSW and paid $3,000 to have Rosie's DNA sequenced. 

The sequencing process compared the DNA from Rosie's tumor against her healthy cells — essentially reading through a long biological instruction manual to find the "spelling mistakes" in the cancer's DNA that set the tumor apart from her normal tissue. That sequencing produced a massive file of mutation data. On its own, it was just numbers. The challenge was knowing what to do with it.

With that genetic data in hand, Conyngham used AlphaFold, an AI program developed by Google DeepMind that predicts the 3D structure of proteins, to model a protein called c-KIT that drives mast cell cancer in dogs. Based on abnormalities in the tumor protein, he pinpointed a drug that could potentially target Rosie's cancer. 

His next step hit a wall. When a pharmaceutical company refused to supply a promising immunotherapy drug for compassionate use, Conyngham pivoted. 

He then worked with Ramaciotti Centre director Martin Smith, UNSW RNA Institute director Pall Thordarson, and others to develop a customized mRNA vaccine made from Rosie's tumor, using the AI tool Grok to design the final construct. 

It was a one-off product, made just for Rosie, encoding several of the mutations in her tumor designed to teach her immune system to recognize and attack the cancer. 

Getting the vaccine administered wasn't straightforward either. "I had to do everything by the book because you can't just willy-nilly create a vaccine in Australia," Conyngham told The Australian. "The red tape was actually harder than the vaccine creation." Mari Maeda, founder of the Seattle-based Canine Cancer Alliance, heard about Conyngham's efforts and alerted Rachel Allavena at the University of Queensland's School of Veterinary Science, who had the ethics approval to test immunotherapy in dogs. 

The customized vaccine was shipped to Allavena's lab in Gatton, a rural town outside Brisbane. Conyngham made the 10-hour drive for Rosie's first injection in December, followed by a booster in February. 

The results were striking. By mid-March, the tennis ball-sized tumor on her leg had shrunk by roughly 75%.

"In December she had low energy because the tumors were creating a huge burden for her," Conyngham told The Australian. "Six weeks post-treatment, I was at the dog park when she spotted a rabbit and jumped the fence to chase it." 

Researchers at UNSW confirmed it was the first time a personalized cancer vaccine had ever been designed for a dog. "This is still at the frontier of where cancer immunotherapeutics are and ultimately, we're going to use this for helping humans," said Thordarson. "What Rosie is teaching us is that personalized medicine can be very effective, and done in a time-sensitive manner, with mRNA technology." 

Conyngham has been careful to temper the headlines. "I'm under no illusion that this is a cure," he said, "but I do believe this treatment has bought Rosie significantly more time and quality of life." 

One resistant tumor has prompted a second round of analysis and a follow-on vaccine targeting a different set of mutations. 

Scientists have also urged the public to approach the story with nuance. An oncologist writing in The Conversation noted that mast cell tumors can behave unpredictably, and that we cannot be certain how much of Rosie's improvement is due to the vaccine, how long it will last, or whether the same approach would help other dogs — let alone humans. The AI did not "cure cancer" by itself; qualified scientists still had to check its work and perform the hard laboratory steps. 

Despite the cautions, the scientific community has been quietly electrified. Martin Smith, director of the UNSW Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, posed the question now echoing through research labs worldwide: "It raises the question — if we can do this for a dog, why aren't we rolling this out to all humans with cancer?" 

Thordarson argued on social media that Rosie's story demonstrates that technology can "democratize" the process of designing cancer vaccines. 

For the informed public, the most important takeaway may be that the basic ingredients of high-end personalized medicine are becoming more accessible. A motivated dog owner can now order tumor DNA sequencing, ask an AI to help interpret it, and partner with an academic lab to turn that interpretation into an mRNA vaccine. 

Conyngham spent $3,000 to sequence Rosie's DNA, though without scientists volunteering their time and resources, producing the mRNA nanoparticles would have cost an estimated $100,000 or more. 

He is now exploring how to help others access similar treatments. "A lot of people have been asking if this can be done for their dogs and for people," he said. "I'm speaking with everyone involved to see what is possible here." 

Rosie, once given months to live, is still chasing rabbits. And in doing so, she may have helped point the way toward a new era of cancer medicine, one where personalized, AI-designed treatments are no longer just the domain of elite research hospitals, but potentially within reach of any patient willing to push the frontier.