Former President Jimmy Carter announced in August he had Stage IV cancer – a melanoma that had spread to his brain. The expectation was that he had only weeks to live.
But while teaching Sunday school in his small church in Georgia earlier this week, the 39th President revealed that prayers were answered. Against the odds, he was deemed cancer-free.
The prayers may have been part of the solution, but it was also one of the latest immunotherapy drugs which may have reversed the momentum of the disease, experts said.
The main drug that Carter had been prescribed was Keytruda, based on the active compound pembrolizumab. Indicated for metastatic melanoma and non-small-cell lung cancer, the drug is designed to essentially jump-start white blood cells to begin attacking some of the body’s own cells. With added boost from the immunotherapy, the body kills off some healthy cells – but is also able to overwhelm the growing cancer.
The drug had been approved just last year by the FDA. Other immunotherapies have proven effective at targeting cancer by essentially arming and customizing the immune system ahead of battle. The new wave of immunotherapies began in 2011 with the FDA approval of Yervoy, a Bristol-Myers Squibb drug based on their discovery of ipilimumab. Since then, the immunotherapy concept has proven effective in Provenge for prostate cancer, and among some of the more-treatable breast cancers.
[pullquote]The prayers may have been part of the solution, but it was also one of the latest immunotherapy drugs which may have reversed the momentum of the disease, experts said.[/pullquote]
A disease expert told the Associated Press that the news was a boon to the former president – and to patients like him. Further tests remain to be done, but the disappearance of four lesions on Carter’s brain – and no development of other growths – show that much headway has been made against the disease.
“For today, the news cannot be better,” said Len Lichtenfeld, the deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society. “Circumstances may change over time or he may be in a situation where it does not recur for many years or at all.”
Carter told the Associated Press that he had reacted well to the drugs – and was feeling healthy enough to continue volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and at The Carter Center, both of which he had continued even when the news appeared to be dire.
Carter also said in a statement that he would continue with three-week treatments of the drug, even as the cancer is undetectable.
“And when I went this week, they didn’t find any cancer at all,” said the former president. “So I have good news.”
Major drug companies have been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in investigating immunotherapies – including a potential $300 million deal between Eli Lilly and a German startup announced in May.
