ChatGPT did not cure a dog’s cancer

When an Australian tech entrepreneur with no background in biology or medicine said ChatGPT helped save his dog from cancer, the story couldn’t avoid spreading. This is the kind of validation Big Tech has long desired: proof that AI will revolutionize medicine and overcome one of its deadliest diseases. The reality, as always, is more complex.

The version of the story that circulated online was first reported australianWas relatively straightforward. In 2024, Sydney-based Paul Cunningham learns that his dog Rosie has cancer. Chemotherapy slowed the disease but failed to shrink the tumor. After veterinarians said “nothing could be done” for the Staffordshire Bull Terrier-Shar Pei mix, Coningham said, “I took it upon myself to find a cure.”

Cunningham said he used ChatGPT to brainstorm treatment ideas. The chatbot brought up immunotherapy as an option and pointed her to experts at the University of New South Wales, who genetically profiled Rosie’s cancer. They then used ChatGPT and Google’s protein structure AI model AlphaFold to help understand the results. With the help of UNSW Professor Páll Thordarson, they pursued a personalized mRNA vaccine tailored to Rosie’s tumor mutation. Thordarson said australian They believe this is the first time such a treatment has been designed for a dog.

A few weeks after Rosie’s first injection last December, Cunningham said her tumors had shrunk and she was doing better, even chasing rabbits in the park. However, they have not disappeared completely, and one tumor did not respond at all. “I have no illusions that this is a cure, but I am confident that this treatment has given Rosie significantly more time and quality of life,” Coningham said. Australian.

As the story progressed, those nuances were lost. newsweek The headline was, “Owner with no medical background discovers cure for dog’s terminal cancer,” while New York Post Announced that “A tech professional saves his dying dog by using ChatGPT to code a custom cancer vaccine.” On social media, many accounts promoted Rosie’s case as a “cure” and indicated that a new era of personalized medicine had arrived. Some, notably OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman, certainly should have known better, while others, like Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, did and shared it without any publicity. Elon Musk also joined in, keen to point out that XAI’s Grok also played a role – a detail that was absent from much of the original coverage.

The story gives too much credit to AI. Not only was Rosie not cured of the cancer, but it is also not clear whether the mRNA vaccine was responsible for her improvement. The personalized treatment was administered with another form of immunotherapy known as a checkpoint inhibitor, which was designed to help the immune system target the tumor, making it difficult to know if the vaccine had any effect. Martin Smith, one of the scientists involved, said the team is conducting tests to investigate the immune response.

Nor was the vaccine prepared by a chatbot. ChatGPT did not design or create Rosie’s treatment; Human researchers did. At best, the chatbot acted as a research assistant, helping Congham parse the medical literature — impressive, but far from implying success.

Reports on the role of alphafold are also unclear. David Asher, professor and director of biotechnology programs at the University of Queensland in Australia, told The Verge This model “can contribute to structural hypotheses about proteins, but it is not a turnkey cancer-vaccine design system.” Official guidance also warns that AlphaFold is not valid for predicting the effects of certain mutations and does not model “many biologically important contexts,” he said.

Grok’s contribution is even more difficult to underline. On Asher said that Grok would actually fall into the same category as ChatGPT: a tool that can “search literature, summarize papers, translate jargon, suggest workflows, draft code or documents, and help the user think through alternatives.” A useful role, but hardly what “designing a cancer vaccine” suggests.

Overall, Asher said that Rosie’s case is “viewed as an unusual, highly specific proof of possibility, rather than a template that can be easily reproduced by ordinary people.” This requires “substantial” expert labor, he said, “not just a chatbot and a few prompts.”

This distinction is especially important in medicine, where success depends not only on producing reliable information, but also on the physical work of the expert, producing, testing, and providing the actual treatment. Alvin Chan, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who is building AI for biomedical and drug discoveries, said: The Verge The “AI made it” framing ignores the enormous human effort, without which “the AI’s output would have been just text on a screen.” In Rosie’s case, AI is better understood as a tool for sketching blueprints rather than a creator of treatments.

The whole thing has a slight smell of a PR stunt that’s hard to shake. Bold claims made from dubious foundations using obscure methods fit comfortably into the world of tech fundraising. mRNA vaccines – like the broader promise of personalized medicine – are largely unproven as cancer treatments in humans, let alone dogs, and while that may be anecdotal, it seems too neat and convenient for the thousands of dollars and significant expertise needed to turn the idea into a viable treatment.

I contacted Cunningham for a chat on X but did not receive a response. His profile reads, “Ending Cancer for Dogs” and links to a Google Form describing his “dream of making this process something everyone can access.” The form asks if your dog has cancer, whether you are a researcher or scientist looking to get involved, and whether you are an investor.

I think it would be a mistake to dismiss Rosie’s story as completely meaningless. AI may not replace the lab any time soon, but it is making science more accessible to ordinary people. However, this is not the same as making care more accessible, and few patients – or pet owners – have access to the world-class experts, specialized equipment and sufficient funding needed to turn that information into actual treatment.