NMRRC in persons. Natalya Sergeevna Sergeeva.

“There’s nothing more interesting than exploring the structure of the world”

Natalya Sergeevna Sergeeva, professor, the head of conservative treatment prognosis laboratory in the P. Hertsen Moscow Oncology Research Institute.

“ There’s nothing more interesting than exploring the structure of the world”

Natalya Sergeevna graduated high school with a gold medal. It would seem that the bright road was opened for her as a daughter of the Chief Surgeon of the Khabarovsk Region and Rector of the Khabarovsk Medical University. However, circumstances of being such an influential figure’s daughter worried her and affect her place of study choice.

– I will go to Ural Polytechnic University at the Faculty of Physics – she told her parents decidedly.

Even in school she has already decided to prove her value in this life. Physics and mathematics were the most entertaining for her, so she decided to become a theoretical physicist. The father calmly listened to the arguments, and was in no hurry to dissuade his beloved daughter. Once returning from a business trip to Moscow, he brought the scientific journal Biophysics and remarked: “A new faculty, biomedical, has been opened in Second Medical. Read, think. Maybe you’ll be interested.”

So Natalya went to Moscow.

She entered the Second Moscow State University (2nd MSU) (for now Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University) without any problems, graduated, received her first red diploma in biophysics at this faculty and stayed there in graduate school.

It was an amazing time, society was literally obsessed with science, obviously, just a couple more steps and we will catch what the Universe is like. From quantum to all infinity of the world. The most interesting magazines in the country were “Znanie – Sila”, “Khimia i Zhizn”, “Tekhnika-Molodezhi”, which were worn thin by much reading. Pages with publications of science fiction novels were ripped, including the Strugatsky brothers. People bound books carefully and gave them to friends to read at night, that’s how popular science literature was. Natalya Sergeevna still has libraries of these self-made publications on the shelves.

– At the end of my student life, my father died – remembers Natalya Sergeevna,-  At that time he was the director of the P. Hertsen Moscow Oncology Research Institute (MORI). He, as a surgeon, knew that the disease was progressing. I devoted the rest of my professional life to him, including my doctoral dissertation. He relied on me. And I couldn’t let him down.

In the same 1976, Natalya Sergeevna married a theoretical mathematician, materializing her passion to this field of knowledge in this way. Almost 50 years they have been together.

Father told her “if you want to live better, go and earn money”. Even in my second or third year at the university, I got a job as a laboratory assistant at the department of histology: washing glasses, preparing preparations, and this experience was also useful to me in life. And then my husband and I, two young graduate students who received 70 rubles each, gave lessons for many years in order to do science and be financially independent.

It is interesting that fate, despite the strict decision of the daughter to go only her own way, by unknown paths, one way or another, prepared Natalya S. Sergeeva for a meeting with the institute in Botkinsky drive. Husband’s father – Anatoly Ivanovich Pirogov – had worked at the P. Hertsen Moscow Oncology Research Institute as a director for almost a year. And in 1978, Professor of Moscow State University Yu.P. Kozlov, who received the task of creating a laboratory of biophysics, will invite her to work at the P. Hertsen Institute. After some perturbations in 1990, on the initiative of the director of the Institute, academician V.I. Chissov, with the support of professors G.A. Frank and S.L. Darialova formed a laboratory to develop methods for predicting the sensitivity of a tumor to chemotherapy drugs. And Natalya Sergeevna was offered to lead it. She has been running it for 33 years. Many developments of the laboratory are widely used today in the clinic for the diagnosis and treatment of oncological diseases.

– Then, in the 90s, we proved that a tumor often consists of cells that differ in properties, because they are constantly dividing, and the “daughter” cells differ to a large extent from the “mother” ones.

Therefore, analyzing a piece of biopsy material from only one place is not enough sometimes, and the treatment of one tumor should include a complex of drugs with different mechanisms of action and sensitivity to different cells, says Professor Sergeeva.

The second area of activity of the created laboratory was work with serological tumor markers, which began to appear in the early 2000s, mainly from abroad. Not only patients, but also most doctors did not know how to deal with it.

– I called the clinics in Moscow and said, let me give you a lecture on what tumor markers are, how to prescribe them and what to do with the results. I gave at least 60 lectures,” Professor Sergeeva remembers it with a smile. – And in those days, there was such a thick directory called “Golden Pages” for business at gas stations, I found the editorial office’s phone number and said, let me write you in a popular way what tumor markers are. And i wrote.

P. Hertsen Moscow Oncology Research Institute made a great contribution to the popularization of the use of markers among patients and doctors and was able to attract a significant contingent of patients for early diagnosis based on the development of new methods for detecting tumors. This work is still going on. The laboratory evaluates the effectiveness of new markers, analyzes and makes recommendations which of them are the most promising.

“With the development of genetic forecasting methods as a separate area, we have concentrated on the problems of regenerative medicine,” continues Natalya Sergeevna. “Now the oncological service is faced with the task of not only curing the patient, removing the tumor, but also rehabilitating them and returning them to a socially active life.

The Laboratory for Prediction of Conservative Treatment Methods is looking for methods to create new materials to replace bone and skin defects in cancer patients. This is a very promising direction and work is being carried out, including in collaboration with well-known research centers for 3D printing.

“I was very lucky,” emphasizes N.S. Sergeeva, “All my life I have been doing what I like: I am learning to understand how the world works.”

– And I also had very great teachers: Gennady Iosifovich Klebanov, Yuri Andreevich Vladimirov, Klara Aleksandrovna Agamova, Irina Ivanovna Pelevina, Georgy Abramovich Frank and Sofya Lvovna Daryalova, whom I have already spoken about. They taught me to work with the material, to do science, in which there are no trifles. And, of course, my father, the kind, noble man and very firm in his convictions. Indeed, the result in science, often, is not only insight; it is hard, everyday work.

Press Service of the Research Center of Radiology of the Ministry of Health of Russia