University of North Carolina (UNC) Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center has received $40 million from the OpenAI Foundation — the nonprofit parent organization that governs the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC — to generate data aimed at making personalized cancer vaccines more effective, the Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based cancer center announced September 15, 2026. Immunologist Benjamin Vincent, MD, and computational biologist Alex Rubinsteyn, PhD, are leading the effort, gathering clinical data to train AI models that can identify stronger cancer-cell targets and guide more precise vaccine design. “Personalized cancer vaccines are finally starting to show signs of clinical efficacy, but many fail in the development process because they are too arbitrary,” said Rubinsteyn, an expert in machine learning and computational medicine at the UNC School of Medicine. “Our goal is to help the world design personalized and more effective cancer vaccines, using the power of rich data and artificial intelligence.”
Turning Tumor Biology Into Training Data
Cancer vaccines are built from a patient’s own tumor and immune cells; proteins on the tumor’s surface act like a red flag, and the vaccine trains the immune system to recognize that flag and mount a coordinated attack. But designing one for any individual patient — each with a distinct cancer type and immune profile — takes complex lab work, time, and heavy data analysis. Vincent and Rubinsteyn aim to speed that process up by analyzing hundreds of de-identified tumor tissue and immune cell samples drawn from three biobanks, using the resulting dataset to train improved AI methods for selecting tumor antigens for personalized vaccines. In parallel, the team will compare multiple vaccine formulations in clinical trials for triple-negative breast cancer, measuring how well each raises a tumor-specific immune response. “Selecting tumor antigens that are actually good targets, and understanding the relative potency of vaccine formulations for personalized therapy, are big problems in the field which our work will address,” said Vincent, a member of the Immunology and Immunotherapy Research Program at UNC Lineberger.
Part of a Larger Push for Open Health Data
The grant lands alongside the OpenAI Foundation’s launch of its second science program, Public Data for Health, which funds high-quality, open-access scientific datasets that researchers and AI tools worldwide can use to advance life science and disease research. Jacob Trefethen, Head of Life Sciences and Curing Diseases at the OpenAI Foundation, tied the UNC grant directly to that broader goal: “AI has enormous potential to help researchers design better cancer treatments, but that progress depends on having the right biological data to learn from. UNC’s work will generate data that researchers don’t have at the scale they need today and make those findings broadly available so scientists around the world can build on them. By giving the broader scientific community a stronger foundation to work from, we hope to open up new possibilities for cancer research and ultimately help more patients benefit from advances that once felt out of reach.”
About UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center
UNC Lineberger is North Carolina’s only public National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center and one of just 58 such centers recognized nationally by the NCI. Rated “Exceptional” — the NCI’s highest category, the center brings together physicians, scientists, and health professionals from more than 40 departments and schools across UNC-Chapel Hill.
About OpenAI Foundation
OpenAI Foundation is a charitable organization dedicated to ensuring AI benefits all of humanity, supporting initiatives that advance scientific discovery, strengthen civil society, and build resilience through responsible AI. It is a separate nonprofit corporation from OpenAI PBC that operates independently in support of its charitable mission.
