Former President Jimmy Carter says his latest scans show no signs of cancer.
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Once he learned that the cancer was in his brain, Carter s he thought he had only weeks to live His treatment involved pembrolizumab, one of several new cancer-fighting drugs that work by strengthening the body’s natural immune response to cancer.
Now, only a few months later, the 91-year-old former president is in the clear after a brain scan confirmed that he was cancer-free, the Associated Press reports.
The good news comes roughly three months after Carter began treatment for four small lesions in his brain and had surgery to remove part of his liver. “I will continue to receive regular three-week immunotherapy treatments of pembrolizumab”. There are certain organs or glands in the immune system that can, in a sense, “turn on” the body and cause inflammation, but most patients don’t have that problem and frankly it sounds like the President has done extremely well on this drug.
“The majority of patients can tolerate these drugs extremely well, even patients of an advanced age”, Lichtenfeld said. Instead, they may say things like, “The cancer can’t be seen on the scan” or “I see no evidence of any cancer”.
He expects Carter’s doctors will continue “close surveillance” for any new cancer growth or recurrence in his brain and continue doses of the immunotherapy drug as long as Carter handles it well.
“While giving this therapy, they were able to prevent regrowth of existing tumors and growth of new tumors”, said Shepard. 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.
Chemotherapy has traditionally been ineffective against brain cancer because the cancer-killing chemicals have a hard time crossing the blood-brain barrier to attack tumor cells, Lichtenfeld said. “One hopes that by using immunotherapy the body can respond to whatever happens but cancer cells are clever and can develop workarounds for the various treatments”.
Carter continued teaching Sunday School and helping build homes for Habitat for Humanity in the midst of that, Eyder Peralta wrote for NPR. Keytruda, an engineered immune protein called a monoclonal antibody, disrupts this cloaking effect and lets the immune cells do their job and eat the tumor cell.
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Based on my reading and my personal experience, I can’t imagine that any oncologist would suggest that cancer of a patient under active treatment is gone or has disappeared. That puts the President into a better prognostic category than many other patients who have metastatic melanoma.
