Keytruda has been accredited to the cancer recovery process of former United States’ president Jimmy Carter.
Word has it that the former leader of the U.S. will not undergo the proposed metastatic melanoma treatment. This type of cancer had spread to both Carter’s liver and brain and Keytruda (a type of cancer treatment drug working on the basis of immunotherapy), has been attributed to the former leader’s astonishing recovery from cancer. This ideally brings hope to the many suffering cancer patients that there is indeed a cure for the deadly disease.
Keytruda revolves around Immunotherapy cancer treatment
Of interest to learn will be this drug’s mode of treatment. Actually, Keytruda is among a group of drugs whose treatment is based on immunotherapy. In this type of treatment, the patient’s own immune system is triggered to battle out cancer. Many people refer to Keytruda as a “miracle cure” whereas a number of medics refer to it as “golden age of chemotherapy drugs”.
Introduced in 2014 by a team of American and Israeli scientists, Keytruda is chemically referred to as pembrolizumab. This drug utilizes what scientists refer to as the PD-1(programmed cell death protein 1) pathway in order to fight off the cancerous cells in the body.
In the event of an infection, certain immune cells are triggered in the body. Immune cells known as T-cells are activated upon which they locate foreign particles (infection) in the body system and then eliminate them. Unfortunately, with cancer, the infection disrupts the elimination using the PD-1 pathway. PD -1 is actually a protein that assists in spot checking the immune system. The cancerous cells prevent the activation of T-cells and go unnoticed by simply ‘hijacking’ the PD-1 pathway thus evade elimination by the immune cells.
Without the PD-1 pathway, the cancer cells are detected in the immune cells resulting in the activation of T-cells. Keytruda, together with a number of other immunotherapy drugs, assist in blocking the PD-1 pathway thus exposing the cancerous cells to the T-cells for destruction.
Hope for cancer treatment
The presentation about Keytruda was actually acknowledged by the Federal Drug Administration. With Jimmy Carter’s recovery from metastatic melanoma, Keytruda, and the PD-1 pathway relay hope for the treatment of the various available cancer types. The Cancer Research Institute says that the PD-1 discovery and its exploitation in the fight against cancer will go a long way in revolutionizing cancer treatment.
Statistics about cancer are very worrying. The American Cancer Society projects that about 1.6 million people will be diagnosed with cancer this year in the U.S. and about 0.6 million people will die from this menace. Jimmy Carter’s triumph over cancer is actually eliciting hopes that the disease will soon get treatment and such figures and projections will be a thing of the past.