April 2026 Newsletter

AI and a Determined Dog Owner Beat the Odds

Rosie had multiple tumors all over her legs and paws, making movement difficult. She was diagnosed with mast cell cancer, and no cure was in sight. Paul Conyngham, Rosie’s owner, was determined not to give up without a fight.

Paul reached out to the New South Wales RNA Institute for research. What transpired over the next few months is truly remarkable. Paul received advice from Professor Paul Thordarson, the institute’s head, on how to proceed with designing an mRNA vaccine.

Cancer vaccines are not traditional vaccines. Instead, they instruct the body’s immune system to make proteins that attack cancer cells specific to that particular person—or in this case, dog.

If you can identify the tumor mutations that the immune system can target, you can design a synthetic mRNA sequence to teach the immune system to recognize them. mRNA vaccines act like a software patch, teaching the immune system to identify and attack the offending cancer cells. These therapies have been gradually rolled out in humans over the last 10 years. Just recently, some very promising results have emerged for pancreatic cancer.

Paul had Rosie’s cancer genome mapped, which cost him $5,000. What he received back was 3.1 billion sets of ACTG chemicals (the building blocks of DNA). Paul was completely out of his depth, so he turned to AI for help interpreting the data. Just as AI had guided him to look up Professor Thordarson in the first place, it now helped him sort through the genome to identify the most likely mutated sequences.

With the help of AI and the billions of bits of information, Paul was able to piece together Rosie’s and the cancer’s molecular picture. Working with the NSW research team, they developed an mRNA vaccine that they hoped would give Rosie’s immune system the information it needed to recognize and attack the cancer cells.

Paul had to find a veterinarian to help with the injections. Along with the vaccine, they used other therapies called checkpoint inhibitors to support the mRNA treatment.

At first, Rosie experienced swelling and even developed a few lesions on her skin at the tumor sites. Gradually, she began to improve. Recently, during a visit to the dog park, Rosie jumped the fence to chase a rabbit—clear proof to Paul that she was doing much better.

He is under no illusion that this is a permanent cure or that the vaccine was solely responsible for her recovery. It could have been the combination of therapies given alongside the vaccine.

The important part of this story—other than Paul getting Rosie back—is that without AI, there is no way a layman like Paul could have accessed the tools necessary to make this happen. It’s truly remarkable when technology can sort through billions of bits of information to find sequences and patterns that enable individualized discoveries, even for a small dog in Australia.

AI is still in its infancy, but it is poised to become a revolutionary tool for developing cancer therapies.

Thanks, Andy McClung, CFP®

Sources: News.NESW.edu.au | The Conversation | Google.com

2026 Market Results – 03/31/26