Latest brain scan is good news for Jimmy Carter

Carter, 91, announced his cancer was in remission at the Sunday school class he regularly teaches at a church in Plains, Ga.

Carter announced Sunday that doctors found no sign of the four lesions on his brain discovered this summer.

Those of us who become cancer survivors don’t live on because we fought bravely; those of us who die from cancer don’t perish because we didn’t fight bravely enough.

“There were a lot of happy people at the church”, she said. Subsequent testing showed that it was a form of melanoma, which had spread to four spots in his brain.

He’ll need to continue treatment because a patient in his situation “would need to go three to five years without evidence of lesions”, before doctors can say he’s completely cured, Dr. Dale Shepard, an oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic, told the Times.

Image Guided Cancer Specialist (IGCS), a Florida medical group specializing in the treatment of cancer using the combinations of immunotherapy with image guided ablation, calls the immunotherapy Carter received “one of the greatest advances in cancer treatment”.

But the drugs can help some patients live longer, Turnham said. 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. So people treated with chemotherapy often develop nausea and vomiting.

His successful treatment benefited from improvements in radiation therapy and immunotherapy, said Dr. Alexis Demopoulos, director of neuro-oncology at North Shore-LIJ’s Brain Tumor Center in Lake Success, N.Y. Scientists could design these cancer-specific drugs because of a greater understanding of the genes that drive cancer.

Jimmy Carter credits the new cancer drug Keytruda for shrinking his brain tumors completely.

The new immune therapies don’t kill cancer cells directly. And so very likely his immune system got turned on, attacked those cancer cells, eradicated what was there, and hopefully is continuing to eradicate anything we can’t see, and it now recognizes the cancer as something that it needs to get rid of. “When they first published the data, they did not have more than 8 months of follow-up in the patients they were treating”. 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. I did reach out to Emory directly but they were not able to comment. He seemed resigned and said that he was at ease with his potential death.