How GPT-5 helped immunologist Derya Unutmaz solve a 3-year-old mystery

Immunologist Derya Unutmaz used GPT-5 Pro in late 2025 to solve a three-year-old mystery about how glucose affects T cell development (immune cells that fight disease). His lab had run an experiment in 2022 showing that deoxyglucose (a glucose-like molecule that disrupts a cell's energy production) caused T cells to become inflammatory-response cells at much higher rates than low glucose alone, but they couldn't explain why. GPT-5 Pro analyzed the data and suggested that deoxyglucose interfered with IL-2 protein construction, which normally prevents T cells from becoming inflammatory cells, thereby explaining the unexpected results.