CommonHealth: The Immunotherapy Medicine Helping Jimmy Carter Battle Cancer

Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States, announced Sunday that his most recent MRI brain scans showed no signs of cancer.

Jill Stuckey, a member of the church said the day started as a typical one, with Carter and his wife Rosalyn, entering the premises filled with about 300 people for Sunday school. He said doctors found four spots of melanoma on his brain.

Jan Williams who owns the Plains Historic Inn and Antique Mall says those who get the chance to go to Carter’s Sunday school lessons have been given a priceless gift and this news serves as another inspiration. He revealed in August that he had been diagnosed with melanoma and had begun treatment, including surgery to remove part of his liver, targeted radiation therapy and doses of a recently approved drug to help his immune system seek out any new cancer cells.

Nevertheless, he said, the news is an encouraging sign for Carter.

As we have previously reported, immunotherapy is a recent cancer treatment trend in which doctors use forces within a patient’s own body to fight the disease.

In that sense, he said, Carter’s age actually might have worked in his favor.

It’s not clear what other scans Carter’s medical team at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute have performed. 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. The job of the immune system is to identify “foreign” substances in the body and attack them.

Earlier, MRI scans showed that the cancer spots were responding to the treatment, as per Carter.

Pembrolizumab, the drug Carter received, is an example of the latter type of immunotherapy. “I can’t think of a better Christmas present”. “He’s not going to stop doing the treatment, but at this point, there’s no cancer”.

Information for this article was contributed by Kathleen Foody of The Associated Press; by Ashley Southall of The New York Times; and by Brady Dennis, David Weigel and Michelle Boorstein of The Washington Post.