Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter says he’s cancer free

In this November 1, 2015 photo, former President Jimmy Carter is interviewed at a Habitat for Humanity project site in Memphis, Tenn.

Carter first shared the good news Sunday morning at the Sunday school class he teaches a Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga.

“He said he got a scan this week and the cancer was gone”, church congregant Jill Stuckey told the paper by phone, adding that “the church, everybody here, just erupted in applause”.

President Carter has remained active during his treatment.

Dr. Leonard Lichtenfeld of American Cancer Society told CNN that he was aware of the kind of treatment Carter was receiving, and called his healing the “best news possible”, given a hard prognosis.

Several of Carter’s relatives died of pancreatic cancer, which tends to show up earlier in life.

Carter publicly announced his cancer battle in August.

Immunotherapy has proven effective for melanoma, the type of cancer for which Carter received treatment. He has been in treatment since.

It’s not clear what other scans Carter’s medical team at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute have performed.

Immune therapies are approved for lung and kidney tumors as well as melanoma, said Dale Shepard, medical oncologist at Cleveland Clinic. These drugs interfere with that process, so, by interfering with that shutdown process, they allow the immune system to do its job. It says one of its researchers, Dr. Jason Williams, has suggested the immunotherapy drugs directly into the cancerous tumor and combine it with image-guided cryoablation. Despite some apparently permanent debilitating side effects, ranging from chemo-induced neuropathy in both feet to a form of radiation enteritis and altered blood-cell counts, I’m incredibly lucky.

Additionally, there is more hope the cancer won’t return with immunotherapy. However, the immune system has a harder time identifying cancer cells as foreign, sometimes due to the fact that they don’t appear different enough from normal cells or the immune system isn’t powerful enough to take on the cancer. Then, with the help of radiation therapy, which works to shrink tumors by killing cancer cells, it can knock the cancer out.

‘There’s no cancer in his body at this point, ‘ said James Carter.