“When I went this week, they didn’t find any cancer at all, so I have good news”, Mr Carter told the crowd at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains on Sunday, according to a video from NBC News.
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During his Bible lesson at the church, the 91-year-old American politician said when doctors saw his brain scans this week, they didn’t find any cancer. When he had a small portion of his liver surgically removed, the doctors found the four new spots in the brain, which were treated by Keytruda every three weeks.
This is not necessarily a “cure”, but it’s hard to imagine a more striking illustration of recent progress on treating malignant melanoma, once considered an imminent death sentence.
EB: It’s incredibly exciting. Whether we can call it a miracle or not, it will take time to tell.
But Demopoulos noted that Keytruda also is a very new drug, with the first results of its clinical trial published in The Lancet in 2014. And what the Keytruda did is it turned on the immune system to act against those tumors.
“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.
The drug is part of Merck’s immunotherapy system for fighting cancer, and is the first of a new class of drugs that uses the body’s immune system to fight melanoma that has spread in the body.
Immune therapies such as Keytruda, the brand name for pembrolizumab, have transformed the treatment – and the outlook – for some cancer patients over the past few years.
While Carter’s case doesn’t mean that everyone of such advanced age should undergo such cancer treatment, it does demonstrate that patients should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and that age should not be automatically used as a reason to automatically exclude them, Dr. Tessler adds.
“While giving this therapy, they were able to prevent regrowth of existing tumors and growth of new tumors”, said Shepard. Carter’s grandson James Carter confirmed the good news as well.
Over the weekend, Carter stunned the medical world by announcing that he is now cancer-free.
For now, President Carter will continue part of his treatment as he announced, and his status will likely be regularly monitored.
“His greatest risk was that he was going to get disease developed in new locations, but seemingly that hasn’t happened”, Shepard told the Times.
I think we definitely can say that. “But then we had another MRI and it showed I have four places in my brain”. “So a lot of people prayed for me, and I appreciate that”.
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Transcription thanks to Radio Boston’s Virginia Marshall.
