INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — More than 300 thousand people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, and it’s not just a disease that impacts women.

Almost 280 men will be told they have it. And for men, the diagnosis is commonly made after the cancer has spread.

That means curing it is even harder, if not impossible.

But now, one man is adapting a theory from farmers to change how men and women with breast cancer are treated.

University of Utah Neurobiologist Christopher Gregg has dedicated his life to studying human genetics, but little did he know he would become his own lab rat.

“As somebody who does run a lab with many lab mice, the irony has not been lost on me,” Gregg said.

Gregg was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I woke up one morning and my nipple was bleeding,” Gregg said.

After a mastectomy, he was told the cancer was gone. Then eight years later, an MRI revealed a large tumor on his hip and spine.

“I knew that a Stage 4 diagnosis with metastatic disease and different sites was a terminal diagnosis. I knew right away,” said Gregg.

Gregg gathered the top experts in the field and found new ideas that would change the course of his treatment. Those ideas were based on how farmers protect their fields from pests.

“You rotate the chemical classes of the pesticides, so you’re never chronically spraying with the same chemical until everybody develops resistant,” Gregg said.

“So, he brought these crazy ideas to me, and they made sense,” said Dr. Sandra Buys, oncologist at the University of Utah.

In 2018, Professor Gregg started Extinction Therapy, rotating already approved FDA medications before his cancer developed resistance.

“The key is that I never progressed or became resistant to 11 different drugs over all of those years,” Gregg said.

“He’s doing better now than I would expect for somebody who’s out as far as he is,” Buys said.

Gregg’s team created an algorithm using AI to accurately measure a patient’s symptoms.

“We don’t need another billion-dollar drug that costs a patient 20 to $30,000 a month to treat their cancer. The dream is a very cheap algorithm that works through your smartphone and tells you exactly when and what to take and how much,” Buys said.

Turning a lethal cancer into a manageable chronic disease.

Gregg and his team will continue to develop the tool. He hopes to make extinction therapy available to metastatic cancer patients in the next three years.

This story was created from a script aired on WISH-TV. Health Spotlight is presented by Community Health Network.