Breakthrough Discovery: Northwestern Medicine Triumphs in Diagnosing Rare Pancreatic Cancer, Paving the Way for a Life-Saving Surgery

Alex Timchak portrait

OAK BROOK, ILLINOIS – During the Fourth of July holiday weekend, Alex Timchak, 47, experienced a severe cough. A few days later, the cough subsided, but discomfort in his left side persisted.

“That was something new. I had not experienced that before, and after about a week, I concluded that I needed to contact my primary care physician,” Timchak said, a psychiatrist who resides in River Forest, Illinois. 

Timchak mentions that his primary care physician informed him that imaging revealed his pancreas was inflamed and the pancreatic duct was enlarged. He was referred to a gastroenterologist at another healthcare system. During an endoscopy, no mass was found, but a biopsy was taken from the region where the pancreatic duct appeared abnormal. The biopsy results were normal, and the gastroenterologist suggested follow-up imaging in a month.

“That didn’t quite make sense to me, so I scheduled an appointment at Northwestern Medicine for a second assessment,” Timchak stated. 

Seeking a second assessment

Timchak consulted interventional gastroenterologist Sri Komanduri, MD, at the Northwestern Medicine Oak Brook Outpatient Center and underwent another biopsy.

While awaiting the results, Timchak and his wife paid a visit to their son, who is studying at the University of Alabama. They had just taken their seats in the stadium for their first Alabama football game when Dr. Komanduri called with the findings.

“Fortunately for Alex, we performed that endoscopic ultrasound again and detected a small growth in the pancreas. However, when we biopsied this lesion, it returned as a neuroendocrine tumor, which is markedly different from typical pancreatic cancer, or what we refer to as adenocarcinoma,” Dr. Komanduri explained. “The significance of this is that it grows much slower and does not metastasize to adjacent organs nearly as rapidly as the standard pancreatic cancer.”

“I won’t lie, I leaped up, pumped my fist, and exclaimed loudly, ‘Yes’, because I realized that this presented a completely different scenario than what I had been most anxious about,” Timchak shared.