Scientific life in 2017
The Almazov Centre with its core specializations — cardiology and angiology — is among the twenty national medical research centres composing the network set up by the Russian Health Ministry.
October 2017 saw the opening of the Preclinical Translational Research Centre. This unique facility has an animal house for SPF laboratory rodents, areas for large animals (pigs, monkeys) and aquatic animals (fish, frogs, tailless amphibians), fully equipped labs and operating rooms. The Preclinical Translational Research Centre comprises a number of research departments: toxicology, pathology, microbiology, cell technologies and molecular biology, biochemical studies, experimental pharmacology and physiology, chemical analysis and systemic circulation research lab. One of the main promising areas of research is cardiac protection.
The year 2017 was also marked by the opening of the Children’s Rehabilitation Clinic. It offers inpatient rehabilitation for children after complicated surgeries and for pregnant women with severe health problems. This new Clinic also provides rehabilitation treatment for various medical conditions, including children with rare diseases and post-transplant patients. The rehabilitation clinic was the first in Russia to open two interactive wards for intensive care for mothers and their children. These rooms are fitted with medical, visual and multimedia facilities for rehabilitation and treatment of the patients delivered from the Perinatal Centre.
The specialists of the Experimental Medicine Institute of the Almazov Centre have been successfully working on using the nanocarriers for drug delivery and performing instant diagnosis during cardiac surgery. According to the researchers, the development of delivery methods that may locally increase drug concentration in the ischemic area is one of the leading trends in today’s pharmacology.
In August 2017, the team of vascular surgeons of the Almazov Centre for the first time performed a minimally invasive, single-stage surgery to repair aortic arch aneurysm in a hybrid OR. It should be noted that the Centre’s doctors use hybrid surgical approach more and more widely to treat the conditions associated with the high risk of postoperative complications.
The specialists of the Almazov Centre developed CAR-T cells to treat tumors. For the first time in Russia, the data on CAR-T cells with real therapeutic potential were obtained. The researchers continue to devise ways to obtain universal allogeneic CAR-T cells and study the mechanisms underlying the resistance of solid tumors to CAR-T cell therapy.
The Almazov Centre became the first in Russia to fully provide treatment and rehabilitation care to children with congenital hyperinsulinism. Before that, the patients with this severe diagnosis had to go abroad for treatment. Today, these children can be treated in Russia according to the international protocol.
The doctors from the Research Department for Vascular and Interventional Surgery introduced the minimally invasive repair procedures for peripheral arterial lesions, abdominal aortic aneurysms and descending thoracic aortic aneurysms into daily clinical practice to handle even the most complicated cases.
The neurosurgeons from the Almazov Centre were the first in Saint Petersburg to perform high-tech surgery for craniosynostosis, a very rare birth defect causing problems with brain and skull growth. The implementation of this neurosurgical method in St. Petersburg will enable the doctors to provide high-tech care to children with severe congenital defects of the brain and skull in Russia without referring them for treatment abroad.
The doctors from the Research Department for Vascular and Interventional Surgery performed high-tech surgery to restore the blood flow in patients with severe lower extremity arterial lesions. This minimally invasive treatment gives 100 percent result and is the best option for patients to avoid disability and improve the quality of life.
The surgeons from the Almazov Centre performed a unique sophisticated procedure to remove a malignant kidney tumor using the combined interventional and robotic technique.
In 2017, the Almazov Centre held a number of international congresses and conferences, including the scientific session of the Translational Medicine Cluster, All-Russian Conference Polenov’s Readings, the Russian-Swedish Working Group Meeting on Cooperation in Health Sphere, the German-Russian workshop CVDs and their treatment, All-Russian Conference Team Approach in Modern Endocrinology, 9th Interdisciplinary Conference on Obstetrics, Perinatology and Neonatology Healthy Woman — Healthy Newborn, and more.
The researchers and clinicians from the Almazov Centre gave presentations, presented posters and served as symposium chairs at international congresses and conferences such as ESC Congress 2017 in Rome, Italy, the Annual Scientific Session of the American College of Cardiology in Chicago, USA, the Annual Scientific Session of the American Heart Association in New Orleans, USA, and many others.
The Arterial Hypertension Journal has been included in SCOPUS since 2017 and now comes in two languages. The full-text English version is published on the website htn.almazovcentre.ru.