Former President Jimmy Carter said Sunday his cancer is gone.
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Carter announced from The Carter Center in Atlanta that he was diagnosed with Melanoma that had spread to his brain. “It took everyone by surprise”, said Stuckey. “We’re on the edge of a revolution in oncology”.
“He had a relatively low tumor burden that was treatable”, Lichtenfeld said.
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.
Carter is devoutly religious and continued to teach classes at the church even after news of his original cancer diagnosis had sunk in.
The drug is delivered intravenously every three weeks, costing about ,500 a month. Experts said both those treatments represent significant advances in medicine.
Strong narrow beams of radiation were targeted at the lesions in brain, to avoid damage to other areas of brain. Keytruda works by getting in the way of those proteins, allowing the immune system to access the cancer cells. “It’s very different from traditional chemotherapy”. He said the new scan showed no signs of the original cancer spots or any new ones…
Cancer cells develop receptors that basically cloak them from the immune system, preventing the body from recognizing and targeting the abnormal cells, Demopoulos said. Instead, they may say things like, “The cancer can’t be seen on the scan” or “I see no evidence of any cancer”.
For now, President Carter will continue part of his treatment as he announced, and his status will likely be regularly monitored. Doctors removed a portion of his liver and found four small tumors on his brain.
“He did not say he was cured”. It’s the best news possible in a hard situation. “We have been praying for him and are now eager to celebrate with him”. During treatment, he’s remained active, continuing his humanitarian work and volunteering with ‘Habitat for Humanity’.
“I’ve reacted well to the treatments”, Carter told the wire service in November.
“I haven’t been uncomfortable or ill after the treatments were over”, he said. “So I have good news”. And it was in that very church on last Sunday that he broke the news. “And it’s expensive to have large trials”, Demopoulos said. “Immune therapy, in at least a subset of patients, has truly long-lasting responses”.
“Circumstances may change over time or he may be in a situation where it does not recur for many years or at all”, Lichtenfeld said.
“Yes, these drugs are expensive, but they save a lot of lives”, Demopoulos said.
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Find out more about brain tumors at U.S. National Cancer Institute.
