Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter takes questions from the media during a news conference about his recent cancer diagnosis and treatment plans, at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia August 20, 2015.
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Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, said doctors evaluating melanoma patients will use scans of other body parts beyond where the disease has been found to ensure it has not spread.
Jimmy Carter credits the new cancer drug Keytruda for shrinking his brain tumors completely.
Carter, 91, announced Sunday that doctors found no evidence of the four lesions discovered on his brain this summer and no signs of new cancer growth.
The former President says he will continue to receive regular doses of immunotherapy treatments. He has remained active with the center ever since, and also became active with another humanitarian organization, Habitat for Humanity.
“So a lot of people prayed for me, and I appreciate that.”
Immediately, I felt joy and dismay in equal parts.
In an effort to “control” his cancer, Carter underwent four rounds of radiation, which made him a candidate for pembrolizumab, commonly known as Keytruda, made by Merck & Co.
The new immune therapies don’t kill cancer cells directly.
Oncologists are concerned about giving chemotherapy drugs to older cancer patients because of the toxicity issues, which can cause nausea and fatigue. By adding the immunotherapy to that, it may have also helped the situation.
“It doesn’t mean that there is no cancer in his body; it means that there is no indication that they can find cancer for the present”, said Lichtenfeld.
“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”.
“Before these drugs were available, median life expectancy with melanoma (that had spread) was 11 months”, he said. That puts the President into a better prognostic category than many other patients who have metastatic melanoma.
“The majority of patients can tolerate these drugs extremely well, even patients of an advanced age”, Dr. Douglas Johnson, a Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center melanoma specialist, told the AP.
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Cancer research is giving hope to people with other cancers, as well.
