An Oncologist Explains His Life-Extending Treatment? How Has President Jimmy Carter Survived Cancer for 9 Years

Jimmy Carter is celebrating his historic 100th birthday.

The former president — who holds the record for the nation's longest-lived president — has spent 19 months in hospice care but has overcome many health issues over the years, most notably his battle with cancer.

Carter was 91 years old in August 2015 when he announced that melanoma had been discovered during surgery to remove a small mass in his liver. At that point, the disease had spread to other parts of his body, including four "very small" spots in his brain.

But within months, the Nobel Peace Prize winner revealed that the cancer was completely gone following a successful surgery and innovative immunotherapy treatments. 

“For the public, Carter put immunotherapy on the map, period,” Drew Pardoll, director of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins, told the Washington Post. “Patients started asking for it.” It was called “the Jimmy Carter effect.”

Here’s what to know about the immunotherapy treatment that extended his life.

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“Immunotherapy is now considered a standard pillar of cancer therapy alongside surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy,” Dr. Jedd Wolchok, chief of the immuno-oncology service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, tells PEOPLE.

“The particular kind of immunotherapy that President Carter and many other people receive is called checkpoint blockade, which is essentially a treatment that cuts off molecular breaks that usually keep our immune system under control,” he explains. “And the idea is that by cutting off these molecular breaks, we let the immune system run at a higher level than it otherwise could, and therefore overcome some of the ways in which cancer can cloak itself from the immune system.” 

Following his diagnosis, Carter’s melanoma was treated with immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, which had only been FDA-approved the previous year. 

Wolchok — a member of the American Association for Cancer Research’s B -

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oard of Directors — says that the entire class of medication “transformed” the treatment of melanoma. There had been no previous drugs to treat the disease and improve survival time.

Wolchok recently published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that analyzed these immunotherapies and improving survival rates after a decade of treatment.

“With 10 years of follow-up in the groups in the trial, nearly half of the patients were free from dying from metastatic melanoma. This is a disease where the average survival as recently as 2010 was six and a half months. Now the average survival is actually about six years,” he shares.

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Survival times for brain metastases, which is what President Carter had, were even shorter than that six and a half months, Wolchok notes. Although immunotherapy was fairly new when Carter was treated, Wolchok adds that it is now crucial in almost every patient's treatment plan for metastatic melanoma.

In Carter's case, he was able to stop treatment after about six months. Nine years later he is still cancer-free at 100 years old. 

Wolchok tells PEOPLE that this is one of the benefits of immunotherapy.

“President Carter has been off treatment for many years, and I think that's an advantage of immunotherapy because the drugs are not directly targeting the tumor cells. The drugs are actually enabling immune cells to do the heavy lifting and controlling the cancer,” he explains. “So if the drugs are working well, you shouldn't need to continue them for very long periods of time because the job of the medicines is to really invigorate the immune cells and recognize the cancer in a more forceful way.”

“We know that the immune system has a memory and it remembers those educating events for decades,” Wolchok continues. “Now, it is true of course, that the immune system can become less effective as we get older, but thankfully we have seen that this kind of treatment can help people even when they reach an advanced age.”

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