Former President Jimmy Carter Announces He Is Cancer Free

A close friend and fellow church member said that Carter, 91, first made the said announcement before starting at the Sunday School class he was teaching at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, New York.

“My most recent M.R.I. brain scan did not reveal any signs of the original cancer spots nor any new ones”, he said in a statement.

Carter had been taking a newly-approved cancer drug called Keytruda along with the standard radiation treatment, and will continue to take doses of the drug every three weeks while doctors continue to scan his body for new cancer cells. That does not mean, however, that he has been cured of the cancer, and he will continue to undergo medical treatment.

Even through his cancer treatments, he never missed a Sunday lesson.

“He’s gonna be here for a long time to come I hope”, Williams said through tears. “He said he got a scan this week and the cancer was gone”, Jill Stuckey said via phone from Maranatha, in an article by AJC.com.

The Carter Center said in a statement then that Carter’s “original problem is responding well to treatment”.

Not all cancers will recur, and if cancer cells do survive treatment it could take years before they develop into identifiable disease. Still, cancer cells could remain in the body for many years after treatment.

“In the near-term, you’d say there is good reason to be quite optimistic”, said Dr. Keith Flaherty, a melanoma specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Termeer Center for Targeted Therapies.

The Food and Drug Administration gave Keytruda accelerated approval in 2014 for patients, like Carter, whose melanoma has spread. His age is actually an advantage because immunotherapy works by targeting mutations on cells. Scientists have been seriously exploring using the immune system to battle cancerous cells for decades as an alternative to chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery. The job of the immune system is to identify “foreign” substances in the body and attack them. They lift a brake on the immune system and encourage it to recognize and attack cancer cells. About 5% go into complete remission.

Lichtenfeld cautioned that no one is sure what specific parts of Carter’s treatment caused such a dramatic response, and added that the tumors themselves were caught at a very treatable stage.