Sergueï O. Fetissov, M.D., Ph.D.
Independent Investigator

Sergueï O. Fetissov received his M.D. from the Medical Military Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1989 and obtained a Ph.D. in physiology from the M. Ugrumov Laboratory at the Koltzov Institute of Developmental Biology in Moscow in 1995. He then studied central mechanisms of appetite and body weight control in the S. Nicolaïdis Laboratory at the College de France in Paris, France in 1996-1997 and in the M. Meguid Laboratory at the Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY in 1997-2000. He also studied brain mechanisms of energy and emotional homeostasis in the T. Hökfelt Laboratory and lectured neuroendocrinology in the Department of Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden in 2000-2004. He was in the Organizing Committee of the 43rd Karolinska Institutet Nobel Conference: “Brain Control of Feeding Behavior” in September 2004.

From October 2004, Dr. Fetissov is an Associate Professor of nutrition and neuroscience at the Rouen University Medical School in France. He works together with Pr. P. Déchelotte on a new hypothesis of the origin of anorexia and bulimia nervosa that postulates that the loss of appetite control in eating disorders results from the dysregulation, by autoantibodies, of brain peptidergic circuitries responsible for hunger or satiety. This hypothesis is based on the initial observation of such autoantibodies in patients with eating disorders (Fetissov at al., PNAS 99, 2002), and the levels of which were found to correlate with psychological abnormalities in a further study (Fetissov at al., PNAS 102, 2005). Currently, Dr. Fetissov pursues this project including the development of novel animal models of eating disorders, to further study the molecular mechanisms underlying appetite and emotional abnormalities associated with eating disorders. This project was recently supported by the NARSAD Independent Investigator Award. Dr. Fetissov is a member of the Task Force on Eating Disorders in the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry, and acting as a coordinator of an International research program on the mechanisms of eating disorders together with the Tartu University, Estonia. He also studies development of appetite-related brain circuitries using several genetic mouse models of anorexia in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

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