According to CNN, Carter made the announcement in front of the Sunday School class he was teaching at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. Even with potent treatments there’s a chance that cancer cells could survive and grow over time. The former president was also treated with radiation to his brain and had a large tumor on his liver removed. The drug goes by the name Keytruda commercially.
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Over the weekend, Carter stunned the medical world by announcing that he is now cancer-free.
“The drug President Carter is getting [pembrolizumab], is one of a group of drugs called “check point inhibitors.’ What happens is that the melanoma cells shut down the immune cells” ability to respond”. Carter says he will continue taking his regular 3-week immunotherapy treatments of the cancer drug pembrolizuma, which has shown promise in the treatment of melanoma.
When Keytruda was approved in September 2014, it marked the beginning of the immuno-oncologic age.
Nevertheless, he said, the news is an encouraging sign for Carter.
Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society, who stressed he was speaking about cancer in general, told the AJC, however, that the most recent report doesn’t necessarily mean there is no cancer in Carter’s body. But it’s also possible that this drug may have awakened his immune system and destroyed other cancer cells in his body. “He said he had no evidence of cancer”, Lichtenfeld said. It says one of its researchers, Dr. Jason Williams, has suggested the immunotherapy drugs directly into the cancerous tumor and combine it with image-guided cryoablation. Although targeted therapies can block parts of cancer cells that promote growth, tumors cells often can find a “workaround” and begin growing again.
“I’m feeling better than anybody expected me to, so I’m still maintaining a pretty normal schedule, I’d say”, Carter told NPR last month. Many people are concerned about the cost of new cancer therapies, which now routinely debut at more than $100,000 a year.
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Shepard is not involved in Carter’s treatment, but he said his doctors will probably continue with his treatment another two or three months and then scan again to see if it is still controlling his disease.
