How Has President Jimmy Carter Survived Cancer for 9 Years? An Oncologist Explains His Life-Extending Treatment

Jimmy Carter celebrates his historic 100th birthday.

The former president — who holds the record as the nation’s longest-serving president — spent 19 months in hospital care, but over the years has overcome many health problems, most notably his battle with cancer.

Carter was 91 in August 2015 when he announced that the melanoma was discovered during surgery to remove a small mass in his liver. At that point, the disease had spread to other parts of his body, including four “very small” spots in his brain.

But within months, the Nobel Peace Prize winner discovered that the cancer had completely disappeared after successful surgery and innovative immunotherapy treatments.

“To the public, Carter put immunotherapy on the map, period,” said Drew Pardoll, director of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins. The Washington Post. “Patients started asking for it.” It’s been called the “Jimmy Carter effect.”

Here’s what you need to know about the immunotherapy that extended his life.

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Former President Jimmy Carter 2019 Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto/Getty Jimmy Carter officially ends treatment months after revealing he is now cancer free

“Immunotherapy is now considered a standard pillar of cancer therapy alongside surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and targeted therapy,” Dr. Jedd Wolchok, director of the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine, tells PEOPLE.

“A particular type of immunotherapy that President Carter and many other people are receiving is called checkpoint blockade, which is essentially a treatment that interrupts the molecular breaks that normally keep our immune system in check,” he explains. “And the idea is that by cutting out those molecular breaks, we’re letting the immune system work at a higher level than it otherwise could, and therefore overcoming some of the ways that cancer can hide from the immune system.”

After his diagnosis, Carter’s melanoma was treated with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, which had only been approved by the FDA the previous year.

Wolchok — a member of the American Association for Cancer Research’s Board of Directors — says the entire class of drugs has “transformed” melanoma treatment. There were no previous drugs to treat the disease and prolong survival.

Wolchok recently published a study in New England Journal of Medicine who analyzed these immunotherapies and improved survival rates after decades of treatment.

“With 10 years of follow-up in the trial groups, almost half of the patients did not die of metastatic melanoma. It is a disease for which the average survival in 2010 was six and a half months. Now the average survival is actually about six years,” he shares.

Former President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Diana Walker/Getty

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The survival time for brain metastases, which President Carter had, was even shorter than that six and a half months, Wolchok notes. Although immunotherapy was fairly new when Carter was treated, Wolchok adds that it is now central to almost every metastatic melanoma patient’s treatment plan.

In Carter’s case, he was able to stop treatment after about six months. Nine years later, at the age of 100, he is still cancer-free.

Wolchok tells PEOPLE that’s one of the benefits of immunotherapy.

“President Carter was without treatment for years, and I think that’s an advantage of immunotherapy because the drugs don’t directly target the tumor cells. The drugs actually allow the immune cells to do the heavy lifting and control the cancer,” he explains. “So if the drugs work well, you shouldn’t take them for a very long time because the job of the drugs is really to empower the immune cells and recognize the cancer in a more powerful way.”

“We know that the immune system has a memory and remembers these learning events for decades,” Wolchok continues. “It’s true, of course, that the immune system can become less efficient as we age, but luckily we’ve seen that this type of treatment can help people even into advanced age.”

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education