Breast cancer is not just a disease that impacts women, thousands of men are diagnosed every year.

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 someone who runs 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," Gregg said.

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 everyone develops resistant," Gregg said.

"So he brought these crazy ideas to me and they made sense," University of Utah School of Medicine Oncologist Saundra Buys said.

In 2018, 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 someone 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," Gregg said.

Turning a lethal cancer into a manageable chronic disease.

Gregg and his team will continue to develop the tool, using it in a clinical trial at the Moffitt Cancer Center starting later this year, as well as other clinical trials beginning at Emory University and the Huntsman Cancer Center.

He hopes to make extinction therapy available to metastatic cancer patients in the next three years.