DENVER -- The official state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter will be held this Thursday in Washington D.C. Millions are already honoring Carter's service to the nation, from his diplomacy and humanitarian work to his impact raising awareness of a new cancer treatment that helped save his life.
In 2015, when Carter announced he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, the outlook for patients with that type of cancer was bleak, according to Dr. Sapna Patel, a cancer researcher and professor at the University of Colorado.
"The five-year survival was pretty grim. It was only about one in five cancer metastatic melanoma patients survived to five years," Patel said.
But Carter told the country he'd be trying a new cutting-edge cancer treatment - immunotherapy.
"So President Carter was actually being treated with therapy that was fairly innovative at the time," Patel said. "And it was a new class of medicines called checkpoint inhibitors. They were first developed and approved in melanoma."
Melanoma is a cancer that starts from the pigment cells of the body. Patel said it's most common on the skin but can develop in other areas, including the eyes and the mouth.
She said metastatic melanoma, where the cancer has spread, can be far more serious and far less common.
"It actually makes up only 3% of all melanoma diagnoses," Patel said.
Through his own journey, Carter spread awareness of this new treatment. It helped that he had access to some of the best doctors in the world and that medical advances came far enough just in time to treat him.
"It was actually really good timing," Patel said. "So pembrolizumab was approved right around the time he was getting diagnosed, so it was really considered a standard treatment."
"But it's not clear that we knew the long-term benefit and how long treatment effects would last," she said. "And it turns out, in his case, it really did cure him."
It's a cure that's turned survival rates for metastatic melanoma around.
"And so now, four in five metastatic melanoma patients who have the response that President Carter had are now surviving 10 years with their melanoma. So we are now thinking it's appropriate to use the term 'cure,'" Patel said. "We are curing metastatic melanoma patients."
What was cutting edge then has become standard of care now, helping save lives along the way.
"We've now moved on to combining it with other therapies together. So we might use two immunotherapies together. We get an even stronger response, and potentially even a higher cure rate," Patel said. "So we are really changing the face of this disease."
Patel said watching metastatic melanoma go from a death sentence for patients to a treatable cancer has been amazing to witness. She said immunotherapy treatments are expanding, and already helping treat other cancers - including lung, kidney and certain forms of colon cancer.
Patel said she hopes it can continue to advance and help many more people with cancer worldwide, just like it helped Carter.