How is Former President Jimmy Carter — A Melanoma Survivor — Coping During COVID-19?

The former president, who was in office from 1977 to 1981, also underwent surgery late last year to relieve pressure from his head caused by bleeding from several falls, NBC News reported at the time. Still, despite the health struggles former President Carter has undergone in recent years, he has still made a point to share messages of solidarity with people across the country, and the world, as we grapple with how to handle the ongoing pandemic.

In a March announcement, former President Carter and his wife of nearly 75 years, Rosalynn, urged donors who would normally give money to their human rights foundation — The Carter Center — to instead give to local organizations that are assisting in the coronavirus response.

“As you are well aware, our country is facing a health crisis,” the Carters wrote in their announcement. “Though the behaviors of COVID-19 are not fully known, what we do know makes it a global threat to our physical and economic health … it is in this spirit that we ask you to forgo your next gift for the work of The Carter Center and direct it to a local group that is reducing the suffering caused by this pandemic.”

Jimmy Carter’s Cancer Journey

At the time of the former president’s diagnosis in 2015, immunotherapy was a really new — and really promising — method for treating advanced cancer. Carter was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma — meaning the disease had already spread to distant parts of the body by the time of diagnosis.

Yet, just months after Carter went public with the diagnosis, he announced that an MRI showed no evidence of disease in December 2015. This is due to the groundbreaking treatment the former president was given — a combination of surgery, radiation and an immunotherapy drug called pembrolizumab (Keytruda).

How Does Immunotherapy Work?

Immunotherapy has changed the game when it comes to treating several cancers — melanoma in particular. It works by rallying the body’s own immune system to locate and attack cancer cells.

“When immunotherapy came on the market, it was such an exciting time for everyone involved in the care of melanoma,” Dr. Cecilia Larocca, a dermatologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told SurvivorNet in a previous interview. “The main reason being … you went from this scary, manageable cancer with no treatments to one that could potentially have an incredibly long-lasting result with patients absolutely never having to worry about their melanoma.”

Dr. Cecilia Larocca and Dr. Anna Pavlick explain how immunotherapy is used to treat patients with advanced melanoma.

While immunotherapy is not for everyone and cannot be given to every patient with advanced melanoma, the results can be — like they were for former President Carter — pretty incredible.

“Immunotherapy for melanoma is essentially medicines that will get a patient’s own body’s immune system to wake up and attack and look for melanoma cells,” Dr. Anna Pavlick, a medical oncologist at NYU Perlmutter Cancer Center, told SurvivorNet in a previous interview about the drugs. “Sometimes they may be microscopic, sometimes they may be in the form of tumors in other parts of the body.”

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