Former President Jimmy Carter's public battle with melanoma in 2015 brought global attention to immunotherapy, a groundbreaking cancer treatment. Experts credit Carter's successful treatment with igniting a new era of hope for patients with previously incurable cancers.
Jimmy Carter ’s 2015 melanoma diagnosis introduced the world to immunotherapy, sparking future cancer research. Millions of cancer patients are living longer because of it, experts say.Former President Jimmy Carter was known globally for his diplomacy and humanitarian work. The world of medicine will remember him not only as a person who beat the cancer that spread in his body, but also as arguably the most influential voice to raise awareness of a cutting-edge cancer treatment: immunotherapy.
Carter’s successful cancer treatment “would have been considered a miracle just 15 to 20 years ago,” said Dr. Adam Friedman, chair of dermatology at George Washington University. “The ‘Carter effect’ spawned a new era of hope for patients who would ordinarily be hopeless.”In 2015, a person with metastatic melanoma — a form of skin cancer that has spread throughout the body — was unlikely to survive more than six months, and possibly not even six weeks if he or she happened to be 90 years old.“I’ve had a wonderful life,” Carter said at a media briefing at the time. “I feel that it’s in the hands of God and my doctors, and I’ll be prepared for anything that comes.”There are many possible reasons Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, survived as long as he did. He had access to some of the best cancer doctors in the world as he underwent surgery and radiation. He was a man of strong faith and positive outlook. He also revealed that he would be treated with a relatively new immunotherapy called pembrolizumab, sold as Keytruda.“This is a medicine that they use for melanoma that enhances the activity of the immune system,” he said at the time., called Yervoy, just four years earlier, in 2011. Keytruda wasn’t greenlighted until 2014. Both were originally intended for the notoriously hard-to-treat melanoma. Before that, there hadn’t been any new approaches for melanoma in decades, said Dr
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