Cancer spread to Jimmy Carter's brain 9 years ago. Here's how he's lived so long.
Nine years ago, Jimmy Carter held a news conference at the Carter Center in Atlanta to talk about his cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Then age 91, Carter explained that a bad cold the previous May had led to a thorough physical, which by early August 2015 resulted in a diagnosis of melanoma, an extremely dangerous form of skin cancer. He had liver surgery earlier that month, and doctors identified four spots where the cancer had spread to his brain.
Luck played a role, of course. But there's no question, experts say, that he's alive today because of the immune therapy he received.
"It's kind of a trite term, but in so many ways, he's kind of the poster child for immune therapy," said Dr. Stephen Hodi, who directs the Melanoma Center and the Center for Immuno-Oncology at the Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center in Boston. "There were so many issues that he exemplified as a patient."
Just four years earlier, the Food and Drug Administration had approved the first so-called checkpoint inhibitor, generically called ipilimumab. Carter received the second such drug, pembrolizumab, which was authorized only the year before he was given it.
