Larry Stupski's prostate cancer, diagnosed in 2003, is drug resistant, meaning the cancer has figured out how to survive against hormone therapies used to combat it. The 67-year-old former president of the Charles Schwab Corp. is excited about the UCSF-led project to develop more personalized treatments for drug-resistant prostate cancer and hopes to be able to participate in the research.

I had a PSA (prostate-specific antigen) screening every year and one time my PSA rose, but not very high. I then went to get a biopsy, and the biopsy was positive.

My disease was not local enough to get surgery, but it hadn't spread to other parts of my body. I got radiation, and we just watched it through various tests and biopsies. Then, almost four years later, it became clear it had started spreading to my bones and my skeleton. That was based on rising PSA levels and symptoms. I could just feel it.

The first-line therapy is hormonal drugs. Those hormonal drugs really only worked for maybe a year or 15 months. After that, I got my first round of chemotherapy.

It's hormone-resistant prostate cancer; sometimes it's called castration-resistant prostate cancer. This kind of cancer will develop resistance to the drugs you give it, including the chemotherapy drugs.

I was in two clinical trials for two drugs that were then experimental, one of which has since been approved by the FDA. Those drugs kept the cancer from spreading until 2011. In September 2011, I started chemotherapy again. They're going to try a combination of drugs to see if we can hold off the next round of chemotherapy as long as possible.

In America, 1 in 6 eventually gets prostate cancer. I had one friend who said everybody gets it and it's no big deal, but it's a big deal to the men who get it. It's a serious disease and even effective treatments that work for early prostate cancer can create uncomfortable consequences.

What they (the UCSF-led team of doctors) really hope to be able to do is categorize the cancer at a gene expression level and, from that, create a table of medicines or drugs that may work in combination, or maybe new drugs, to be effective against what they call protein pathways that drive the cancer.

Sometimes I think of the strategy in World War II when they bombed a whole neighborhood to get a factory. Over time, the (military) techniques get more finite and more finite to the point now where they have laser-guided orbits that can bomb a card table half a world away. They'll be able to look at cancer at such a deep and specific level and come up with a drug or combination specifically attached to the cancer in the individual.

Prostate cancer is not as simple and straightforward as we think. What a lot of people don't get is there are very complex cancers, and there are fairly simple ones. A lot of the simple ones have very high cure rates. But in a complicated cancer, the cancer keeps hijacking the survival mechanisms of the body.