Jimmy Carter shared happy news yesterday when he told his Sunday School class that recent brain scans show he is clear of cancer. By response, I mean any shrinkage of the cancer – so complete responses like his, when it shrinks to nothing, but then also responses where it shrinks a little bit.
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Additionally, there is more hope the cancer won’t return with immunotherapy.
Carter’s family is no stranger to cancer; three siblings and his father died from pancreatic cancer.
They said when the former president received his diagnosis, he did not feel sorry for himself and instead handled it with no stress and went through all of his treatments. The issue does become that there still are those people who aren’t responding to treatments, which is the group we are most targeting now with our research, to try and figure out who those are and what we can do for them, and how we make sure that we get them the best possible next steps in treatment. He will continue with the immunotherapy treatment of pembrolizumab to prevent cancer from developing in other parts of his body. He said the new scan showed no signs of the original cancer spots or any new ones… That already suggests that this may have been more slowly developing. In November, doctors Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta had stated that Carter’s treatments were going well and that the cancer had not spread no more.
The 39th President of The United States said in a statement that he will continue to receive doses of Keytruda, a recently approved auto-immune drug to help his body seek out cancer cells in his body. “But you can have a very large tumor that the immune system seemingly ignores, even though it’s an abnormal collection of cells”, he said.
Some treatments work by enhancing the immune system overall and other treatments specifically target cancer cells.
“Keytruda blocks the cancer from telling the immune system to go away, by binding those receptors and preventing the cancer from flipping that off-switch”, he said. These drugs interfere with that process, so, by interfering with that shutdown process, they allow the immune system to do its job. This is how our body kicks a cold or the flu.
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“The result is that the immune cells, once awakened, are able to attack the cancer cell and either destroy it, or, as in the case for some patients, basically keep it in check”, he says. Some researchers are also looking into how to harness the knowledge gained from immunotherapy to develop cancer vaccines. He began receiving radiation treatments the same day. Reuters reports that about 30% of people treated with pembrolizumab experience significant tumor shrinkage.
