Former President Jimmy Carter Announces He Is Cancer

Carter made the announcement to a crowded Sunday School class he was teaching at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, garnering a standing ovation from hundreds of people in the room. “He’s not going to stop doing the treatment, but at this point, there’s no cancer”.

Additionally, there is more hope the cancer won’t return with immunotherapy.

The former President announced in August that four spots of cancer had moved to his brain after the cancer was first found in his liver. Still, cancer cells could remain in the body for many years after treatment. “There have been instances of relapse two to three years in while using immunotherapy treatment, but you’d say there is a good reason to be quite optimistic”.

“He said he got a scan this week and the cancer was gone”, she said.

He received radiation targeting the tumors and regular doses of the drug.

Experts have called Keytruda and other immune therapy drugs “game-changing” for patients with the skin cancer that kills almost 10,000 Americans each year.

“The result is that the immune cells, once awakened, are able to attack the cancer cell and either destroy it, or, as in the case for some patients, basically keep it in check”, he says. Some researchers are also looking into how to harness the knowledge gained from immunotherapy to develop cancer vaccines.

“The majority of patients can tolerate these drugs extremely well, even patients of an advanced age”, Dr. Douglas Johnson, a Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center melanoma specialist, told the AP. About 5% go into complete remission.

Once he learned that the cancer was in his brain, Carter s he thought he had only weeks to live His treatment involved pembrolizumab, one of several new cancer-fighting drugs that work by strengthening the body’s natural immune response to cancer.