A cancer treatment made for one person

A cancer treatment was just announced that is so customised, no two patients on Earth can ever receive the same one. It's built from the DNA of your own tumour, and AI helped design it.

Moderna and Merck ran the biggest trial this kind of treatment has ever faced: 1,137 people with high-risk melanoma, all after surgery to remove it. Some received the standard immunotherapy drug on its own. The rest received the same drug plus a shot made for them alone.

Doctors sequence your tumour's DNA and your healthy DNA, then find the mutations that exist only in your cancer. AI predicts which of those your immune system can actually attack, and the best candidates, up to 34 of them, get written into an mRNA vaccine. It works like a wanted poster, teaching your body to hunt anything that matches your exact cancer.

The trial met its goals. The earlier trial of the same treatment showed a 49 percent lower risk of recurrence or death, and Moderna's share price rose 177 percent in a day, the biggest jump in its history.

Everyone's arguing about whether AI can write emails. For as long as medicine has existed, treatments were designed for the average patient. This one was designed for exactly one.

That's the version of AI worth watching.