Jimmy Carter says brain cancer is gone

“We’re on the edge of a revolution in oncology”.

“The goal is control and to have a good quality of life”, Curran said. In November, Carter’s doctors from the Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta said his treatment had gone well, and they saw no more signs of the cancerous cells. According to The Guardian, the 91-year-old was given pembrolizumab, one of the first immunotherapy drugs, which is sold under the brand name Keytruda in the U.S. Experts said both those treatments represent significant advances in medicine. Then, with the help of radiation therapy, which works to shrink tumors by killing cancer cells, it can knock the cancer out. “They were very small spots, about two millimeters”, he said. Along with the liver surgery, he received a round of radiation and the drug Keytruda every three weeks, the AP reported.

He says, “There is no question that this drug and drugs similar to it are indeed very promising, they are changing the landscape of cancer care for many patients”. Doctors didn’t find cancer signs during his recent scan. With old-line chemotherapeutic agents, a patient’s cancer often develops resistance against treatment.

And to add more to that, the Keytruda has been found to have lesser side-effects compared to chemotherapy.

Immune therapies are approved for lung and kidney tumors as well as melanoma, said Dale Shepard, medical oncologist at Cleveland Clinic.

“He did not say he was cured”. “It is certainly possible he could go on for a significant period of time without any new metastases. That’s awesome progress in a short period of time”. “We don’t know what the future holds for him”. He has remained active with the center ever since, and also became active with another humanitarian organization, Habitat for Humanity. “But we now have to rethink this because Jimmy Carter’s case shows is that there are obviously patients who can tolerate the treatment and survive”, neurosurgeon Dr. Lee M. Tessler tells Newsmax Health.

Shepard said immunotherapy treatments and cancer can be viewed the way you’d treat a patient with a chronic illness.

“I’m feeling better than anybody expected me to so I’m still maintaining a pretty normal schedule, I’d say”, Carter told NPR during an interview last month.

Dr. Leonard Saltz, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NY, is on the record with his concerns about skyrocketing costs for miracle drugs. “And it’s expensive to have large trials”, Demopoulos said.