Having had several members of my extended family afflicted by various forms of cancer, some fatally, I tend to notice (and track) any news relating to cancer therapies, treatment and potential cures.

That's how I came across a little-known Salt Lake City company several years ago that was working on technologies used to help destroy cancer cells — BSD Medical (OTC BB: BSDM).

Hence, I was quite interested to see news last month that the company had received approval from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration for BSD's technologies to improve treatments for prostate, cervical, breast, and head and neck cancers.

Interested enough that I decided to go see for myself what was going on at BSD Medical, which is how I met Hyrum Mead, BSD's 56-year-old president and chief executive officer.

With the automotive traffic on 2100 South as a backdrop, I met with Mead in his second-story office as he unfolded the story of BSD Medical.

Turns out the company has been around for close to forever - 25-plus years - although Mead only joined the firm about four-and-a-half years ago.

Most recently, Mead had served as president of Electro Controls and vice president of ZERO Enclosures (both in Utah), and when he joined BSD he found a company that had gone public through a reverse shell merger in 1997 and was bumping along at under $1.00 per share.

Within six to nine months, BSDM had jumped to more than $4.00 per share on dramatically increased volume before beginning its slide back to the $1.00 price range. Until, that is, the middle of last year when the stock began climbing again.

Before addressing BSD's prospects from a financial perspective, let's shift gears to focus on cancer for a bit.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States each year, with more than 500,000 cancer-related deaths and more than a million new cancer cases reported last year alone.

Simply put, cancers are cell-growth run amok. These mutated cells require more energy to survive than cells of normal tissue.

As these malignant tissues grow explosively, they generally outstrip the ability of the blood supply, causing weird blood vessel growth inside a tumor and leaving cancerous cells oxygen-starved as a result.

Unfortunately, both radiation and chemotherapy treatments rely on the blood system to help defeat cancer.

For example, an outcome of radiation therapy is the fact that the treatments cause the formation of what are called "free radicals" in the bloodstream - molecules of oxygen that are broken apart by the radiation to form unstable negative oxygen ions that attack DNA strands in cancerous cells.

On the other hand, chemotherapy relies on the patient's blood to deliver chemicals to the tumor, a difficult task if the tumor's blood system is messed up.