Jimmy Carter defeated invincible cancer: his treatment marked the beginning of a revolution in cancer therapy

In December 2015, the news that Jimmy Carter, then 91, had recovered from advanced melanoma - previously a death sentence - shook the nation. He instantly became the face of a pioneering approach to fighting cancer, which kills more than 600 people in the United States every year. Washington Post.

Photo: IStock

When Norman S. Sharpless, former director of the National Cancer Institute, spoke to members of Congress about exciting new developments in immunotherapy, "they rolled their eyes," he recalled.

"But when I described the drug as 'the drug that Jimmy Carter took', boom, they knew exactly what I was talking about," he said.

Jimmy was cured of a terminal illness with a drug that curbed Carter's own immune system.

“To the public, Carter put immunotherapy on the map, period,” said Drew M. Pardoll, director of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins University. “Patients started asking for the same treatment.” It was called the Jimmy Carter effect.

On the subject: Joe Biden removed a cancerous growth on the skin: this is not the first time

Even some oncologists were surprised by Carter's stunning recovery. "It was like, 'Damn, this thing really works,'" Sharpless said.

In August 2015, Carter was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, a skin cancer that had spread to his liver and brain. He later said that he assumed he had only a few weeks to live. But along with radiation therapy, he received a new intravenous drug called a checkpoint inhibitor. Such drugs target proteins -- checkpoints -- that keep the immune system in check but can also blunt the body's response to fight cancer.

The result has drawn attention to cancer drugs that do not directly target cancer but instead release the immune system to attack malignancies. By the end of 2015, Carter's cancer was gone, and his treatment was discontinued shortly thereafter.

Carter, now 98, was recently admitted to the hospice, which is designed to make patients feel comfortable at the end of their lives by refraining from trying to cure the disease. He did not provide details about his health condition or say if his cancer had returned. But several immunotherapy experts have said a return of the disease is unlikely given that he hasn't had cancer for several years.

“The chance of a relapse is low,” Pardoll said. The former president has had other health problems in recent years, including several falls.

Carter's 2015 cure of deadly cancer electrified the public and the oncology world, helping to reprioritize government grants and pharmaceutical research. Today, checkpoint inhibitors are approved for more than 20 cancers, including kidney, head and neck, and some lung cancers, often in combination with chemotherapy and other drugs. By 2019, the percentage of patients eligible for the therapy, first approved in 2011, has risen to about 38 percent, according to an estimate published in the journal JAMA Network Open. About 1,9 million cases of cancer will be diagnosed this year.

Public and private insurance companies typically cover drugs with list prices often well over $100 a year. Patients' out-of-pocket expenses vary depending on their health insurance plans.

While oncologists say immunotherapy has changed cancer treatment, curing some patients and extending the lives of many others, they agree that it is far from a panacea. According to research, patient response rates vary widely—between 10 and 60 percent—depending on their type of cancer and whether the drug is combined with other treatments.

“A lot of us were hoping it would work better,” Sharpless said. “Nobody gives up, but it turned out to be more difficult than we thought.”

Hussein A. Taubi, a melanoma expert at Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, agreed that scientists have made great strides in immunotherapy but warned that "we are still losing many patients."

Like the article? Support ForumDaily!?

Because of this, researchers are increasingly focusing on why immunotherapy works in some patients and against some tumors, but not in others. Taubi is studying how immunotherapy can be used to treat cancer that has spread to the brain. About 30 percent of cancer patients develop brain tumors, which can cause speech difficulties and headaches.

The idea of ​​using the immune system to fight cancer has been around for decades. More than a century ago, New York surgeon William Coley, now known as the father of cancer immunotherapy, treated patients with dead bacteria to stimulate the immune system to attack cancer cells.

In the following years, scientists explored immunotherapy, but the resulting drugs were largely ineffective and highly toxic. That changed in 2011 when the Food and Drug Administration approved the first checkpoint inhibitor called ipilimumab, or Yervoy. The drug blocks CTLA-4, a protein in immune cells that reduces their ability to attack cancer.

The drug was based on the discoveries of James P. Ellison, M.D. Anderson, who received the Nobel Prize in 2018 along with Japanese cancer researcher Tasuku Honjo. The two received the award for research that led to the creation of groundbreaking drugs that allow the immune system to fight cancer.

The drug given to Carter in 2015 at Emory University's Winship Cancer Institute is called pembrolizumab, or Keytruda. It was approved in 2014. Merck's oncology blockbuster drug blocks a checkpoint called PD-1 and is used to treat many types of cancer.

In recent years, immune therapy has become widespread, becoming the fourth pillar of cancer treatment along with surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy. In addition to checkpoint inhibitors, a treatment called CAR T cell therapy, which was approved in 2017, is sometimes used to treat blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma. The patient's immune cells are removed, remodeled in a lab to kill the cancer, and reintroduced into the body.

Checkpoint preparations had the greatest impact on advanced melanoma. “It changed the paradigm,” said Cary P. Gross, a professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. Before drugs were developed, patients had several months. Now the five-year survival rate is about 50 percent.

But drugs are not miracle cures. About half of patients with advanced melanoma do not respond to treatment. And the treatment has generally not proven effective for deadly malignancies such as pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, which affects the brain. Treatment is mixed for lung cancer, the leading cancer killer in the United States.

You may be interested in: top New York news, stories of our immigrants, and helpful tips about life in the Big Apple - read it all on ForumDaily New Y.

Gross believes that "we may have to tone down our expectations" for immunotherapy, but results will improve in the coming years.

As much as drugs have evolved, Carter, a former Sunday school teacher, has taught the public important lessons about new treatments and the hope they can provide, Gross said. More recently, he added, Carter highlighted the value of hospices by making his decision public.

Gross said that by sparking discussion on these critical issues, Carter "taught us a lot," including how he wants to spend his final days.

Read also on ForumDaily:

Divorce, new love, loss of chicks: the whole world follows the life of the California sea eagle using a webcam in her nest

From 2024, Americans will have to pay to enter Europe: what other countries take money from US citizens for visiting

Plane flying from Texas hit by severe turbulence: 7 people hospitalized

Do you want more important and interesting news about life in the USA and immigration to America? — support us donate! Also subscribe to our page Facebook. Select the “Priority in display” option and read us first. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our РєР ° РЅР ° Р »РІ Telegram  and Instagram- there is a lot of interesting things there. And join thousands of readers ForumDaily New York — there you will find a lot of interesting and positive information about life in the metropolis.