Jimmy Carter’s Medical Miracle

It all started with a bad cold that wouldn’t go away. When Jimmy Carter visited his medical team at Emory University in Atlanta to get it checked out, a complete physical, MRI and PET scan revealed a growth on his liver. After surgery to remove the tumor in August 2015, Carter was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, which had also spread to his brain.

Melanoma is usually curable if found and treated early. But when it spreads, it can be deadly. An estimated 87,110 Americans were diagnosed with melanoma in 2017, according to the American Cancer Society, and 9,730 died from it.

But new treatments are showing more promise for later-stage melanoma. In addition to surgery and radiation to target his brain tumors, Carter received an intravenous course of an immunotherapy drug, pembrolizumab, which was approved by the FDA in 2014 for advanced melanoma.

“Immunotherapy works by waking up the body’s own immune system,” says Sapna Patel, M.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “It spurs the body’s natural defenses—called T cells—into action; like soldiers they seek out and destroy the enemy. In this case, that enemy is cancer cells.”

Unlike chemotherapy, which destroys healthy cells along with cancer cells, immunotherapy is targeted to destroy only cancer cells. “It’s less toxic and has a much lower level of side effects like nausea and hair loss,” says Patel. Carter weathered the treatments well.

Just four months after his surgery and radiation, Carter announced he was cancer-free after brain scans failed to

notherapy treatments were discontinued three months later.

“I’ve had a wonderful life,” Carter told reporters soon after receiving his diagnosis, thinking he may just have a few weeks to live. Fortunately for all the people he continues to serve through his ministry and many charitable causes, that wonderful life goes on.