OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman amplified a widely shared story over the weekend about a dog treated with a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine developed with help from ChatGPT, drawing attention across tech and AI communities.
The case centres on Rosie, a seven-year-old Shar Pei owned by Australian AI consultant Paul Conyngham.
According to posts circulating online, Rosie had been given only months to live before receiving the experimental treatment, which Conyngham said was developed with assistance from the AI chatbot.
The account spread rapidly after Brockman shared it with his hundreds of thousands of followers, prompting coverage across several technology outlets.
While the treatment itself appears genuine, the role ChatGPT is credited with in developing the vaccine has been debated, with some researchers questioning how much of the process could realistically be handled by a large language model.
Conyngham said he didn't give up on Rosie. Instead, he decided to build a research pipeline out of consumer AI tools. He started with ChatGPT, using it to design a plan of attack.
The model told him he needed genomic sequencing, one sample of healthy tissue and one from the tumor, and pointed him toward specific institutions and equipment.
So he followed that lead.
Ten days. Thirty-times depth in healthy tissue, 60-times in tumor: the higher pass rate needed to isolate the mutations driving the cancer. The Centre returned 320 gigabytes of raw data.
He then focused on c-KIT, a protein well-documented in the published literature on mast cell tumors in dogs.
“We took her tumour, sequenced the DNA, we converted it from tissue to data, and we used that to find the problem in her DNA and then develop a cure based on that,” Conyngham told the Australian Today Show on Saturday. “ChatGPT assisted throughout that entire process.”
AI's true roleEven so, there’s a big gap between ChatGPT finding a cure for cancer and ChatGPT assisting in research.
But Dr. Smith wasn’t a man behind a ChatGPT screen. He was a professor running a university RNA institute, doing what his lab was built to do.
And when Conyngham identified the final vaccine construct—the specific molecular blueprint that would be encoded into the mRNA—he revealed which tool designed it. Not AlphaFold. Not ChatGPT. "The final vaccine construct for Rose was designed by Grok."
That said, he recognized in a separate post that “Gemini did a ton of the heavy lifting too."
ChatGPT was used to sift through scientific papers and identify researchers who might be able to help. The chatbot pointed to the Ramaciotti Centre and suggested sequencing equipment suited to the task, functioning largely as a tool for navigating the research literature. That role can be useful, but it differs from designing a vaccine or performing scientific analysis.
Conyngham used Alphafold to model Rosie's c-KIT protein. The rendering carried a confidence score of 54.55, which UNSW structural biologist Dr. Kate Michie publicly described as low.
Dr. Thordarson was careful about the framing, too.
"This may not have cured Rosie," he wrote on X. "Bought time for sure, yes, but some of the tumours didn't respond."
His team is now checking whether those tumors mutated differently, which would explain why parts of the treatment worked and others did not. The vaccine also did not work in isolation.
iii) It is difficult to estimate real cost in research projects as we all put in a lot of inkind time and resources. iv) the treatment required co-admin of a checkpoint inhibitor (likely to be with all personalised cancer vaccine). V) overall costs are thus quite high./3
The use of AI for cancer treatment has not always been a history of success.
MD Anderson Cancer Center abandoned the project after spending $62 million on it. IBM sold off Watson Health in its entirety in 2022.
The Rosie case doesn’t fall into the category of AI failures. No one was harmed, the underlying science is established, and the researchers involved have recognized credentials.
The mRNA platform itself is supported by clinical research. The unease lies more in how the story has been framed. When AI tools receive credit for work carried out by scientists and research institutions, it can blur public understanding of what the technology actually does.
The researchers who performed the sequencing, produced the vaccine, and managed the safety protocols risk fading into the background.
The episode offers a reminder that AI can assist with tasks such as navigating scientific literature, but it remains far from replacing the expertise and infrastructure required to design and produce medical treatments.
