New immunotherapy drug behind Jimmy Carter's cancer cure

Former president given pembrolizumab, one of the most promising new drugs in the treatment of cancer

Former US president Jimmy Carter says his brain cancer has disappeared. His doctors found four small "spots of melanoma", he said in August, after an operation to remove a tumour from his liver. It sounded like a fatal diagnosis at the time, but the former president said then he was "perfectly at ease with whatever comes". And now it appears to have gone.

It is not a miracle, however much it may sound that way. The former president's doctors believe the melanoma - normally a skin cancer but sometimes forming inside the body - was the primary cancer, and that it had spread to the liver. Carter was given pembrolizumab, one of the most exciting new drugs in cancer treatment today.