Former President Jimmy Carter says he’s cancer

Carter, 91, announced Sunday that doctors found no evidence of the four lesions discovered on his brain this summer and no signs of new cancer growth.

Announced as cancer-free, Carter will still receive infusions of keytruda every three weeks and it can be expensive, costing about $150,000 annually.

Keytruda and other immunotherapy drugs also have improved treatment of brain cancer by unleashing the immune system to attack cancer cells, experts said.

Shepard is not involved in Carter’s treatment, but he said his doctors will probably continue with his treatment another two or three months and then scan again to see if it is still controlling his disease.

A friend and parishioner of Carter’s told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the former president made the announcement toward the beginning of the Sunday school class he leads at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains.

“There may be small nests of cancer cells that they can’t find, so it’s not possible to say President Carter has no cancer cells anywhere”.

Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society says it’s not possible to know whether radiation or Keytruda should get credit for the remission.

Speaking to the A.P.in November, Carter revealed that his treatment process appeared to be going well and that to date he had not experienced any particularly unfortunate side effects.

“There’s no question it’s very positive”, Flaherty said.

He said, “My most recent MRI brain scan did not reveal any signs of the original cancer spots nor any new ones”.

Based on my reading and my personal experience, I can’t imagine that any oncologist would suggest that cancer of a patient under active treatment is gone or has disappeared.

It’s also unclear whether Carter will wind up suffering a recurrence of his cancer, Lichtenfeld added.

While only a portion of melanoma patients have responded to this new generation of treatments, those who do often have shown dramatic, long-lasting responses.

“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. The drug he was given, pembrolizumab (brand name Keytruda), is part of a rapidly growing class of drugs called immunotherapy, which uses the body’s immune system to fight the cancer.