Depression is different for women. One-size-fits-all drugs aren’t helping.
Chen’s research suggests it doesn’t have to be that way. She investigates the interaction between sex differences, stress, and mental illnesses, and her work could lead to some of the first female-specific treatments for depression, PTSD, and anxiety.
Chen finds it baffling that women and men receive the same medical treatments for psychiatric disorders when the differences between them are so significant—not only biologically, but also in terms of howthey experience the same illnesses. Women, for example, are more likely to have anxiety alongside depression. In men, on the other hand, depression is likelier to coincide with substance abuse disorders.
Part of Chen’s frustration with the status quo can be traced back to her upbringing. She went to all-girls schools from second grade through high school. The process of emerging from an insulated, all-female environment into the wider world was eye-opening for her. “One thing that was really striking, in the transition from high school to college, was the realization that the default is not female. The default is male. That was a bit of a shock to me,” she says.
Chen credits her abrupt exit from that nurturing environment with giving her a more clear-eyed view of current societal issues. “Injustices and inequalities exist, and you’re better poised to be able to see them and therefore address them,” she says.
Early results suggest that one dose of the drug is enough to prevent a whole range of fearful, depressive, and anxiety-like behaviors in female mice—and it appears to have very long-lasting effects.
When she arrived at MIT in the fall of 2012, Chen knew she wanted to major in brain and cognitive sciences. Through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), she got a chance to delve into neuroscience research in several MIT labs, including that of Nobel Prize winner Susumu Tonegawa, whose team had just identified brain cells involved in encoding memories. Soon her interest in mental health more broadly was piqued.
“This whole journey began at MIT,” she says—referring both to her studies and to her deepening personal interest in the topic. The school “has a really big focus on mental health, especially for undergrads,” she adds. “Maybe it has something to do with the stressful, high-achieving environment.”
Chen says her parents inadvertently played a role in getting her interested in stress and resilience. They are first-generation immigrants—her mother from China and her father from Malaysia—who met in the UK while studying chemistry. Both went to the US for graduate school and then, in her mother’s case, postdoctoral training. “They are immigrants who did really well, but there are lots of other immigrants who struggle. And it’s very interesting to see what the combination of factors is behind that, how changes and different environments interact with intrinsic biological properties to do with resilience and adaptation,” she says.
In 2014, the summer before her junior year, Chen got a summer UROP working for Steve Ramirez, PhD ’15, who was then a doctoral student in Tonegawa’s lab, studying how we form memories and how optogenetics—a technique that uses light to control the activity of specific neurons—can be used to reactivate positive memories in the brain as a treatment for PTSD and depression. (Ramirez is now a professor of neuroscience at Boston University.)
