Forty million for UNC

The OpenAI Foundation gave UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center $40 million. The foundation is the nonprofit parent that governs the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC.

The vaccines pick badly

Personalized cancer vaccines are finally showing clinical results, but most die in development. The reason, per UNC's Dr. Alex Rubinsteyn, is that the design choices are too arbitrary.

“Personalized cancer vaccines are finally starting to show signs of clinical efficacy, but many fail in the development process because they are too arbitrary.”

Data is the bottleneck

AI can help design treatments only if it has biology to learn from. The grant pays for generating that data, not for building another model.

“AI has enormous potential to help researchers design better cancer treatments, but that progress depends on having the right biological data to learn from.”

Open to everyone

The gift launches the foundation's second science program, Public Data for Health, which funds open-access data sets any researcher or AI tool worldwide can use.

Two tracks at once

The data will train better AI methods for picking tumor antigens. In parallel, UNC runs clinical trials comparing vaccine formulations in triple-negative breast cancer.

Red flags on tumors

Vaccines are built from a patient's own tumor and immune cells. Proteins on the tumor surface act like a red flag in a bullring, teaching the immune system exactly what to charge.