NEW YORK —  Cancer survivor John Kanzius isn't a doctor.

But the electrical engineer and former owner of radio and TV stations is now the home inventor of a possible cancer-treatment device that he built in his kitchen and is now being tested at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (search).

Kanzius' own chemotherapy for his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (search), which is now in remission, spurred him to discover a better method to fight cancer.

"It's what drove me to spend my personal money and my personal time to try to find a way, an easier way, to treat this dreaded disease," said Kanzius, 60, who lives in Millcreek, Pa.

Dr. David A. Geller, co-director of the Liver Cancer Center (search) at UPMC, plans animal testing of the device, for which Kanzius has applied for four patents.

It's a non-invasive radio-frequency zapper that Kanzius says selectively targets cancer cells without destroying healthy cells or creating new cancers, as chemotherapy and traditional radiation therapy sometimes do.

"The next one to two years of animal research will determine if we can use this principle of radio waves delivered from this machine to generate heat to selectively target cancer," explained Geller.

Kanzius remains realistic about his own cancer. It may come back, and his invention may not be available to save his life.

Still, he felt he had to do something while he was going through chemotherapy — and it all started in his wife's kitchen drawer.

Click in the video box above to watch a full report by FOX News' Jamie Colby.