At the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Israel, they cover the entire field of exact and natural sciences.
Furthermore,
“everything that is in between,”
says Professor Alon Chen, in an exclusive interview with
Clarín
during his 48 hours in Argentina.
President of that world-renowned think tank, with findings that make the news with some regularity, Chen has been studying one of those topics
in the middle
(that crosses several disciplines) for 30 years:
stress.
He is
a neurobiologist
, so he does not stop at the symptom, as can happen in
psychotherapy
, and searches “molecule by molecule” for the trace of its origin in the brain.
How this labyrinthine biological entity faces different types of stress.
With the microscope - not with the couch - he has already published evidence that its effect is not the same in men as in women, nor at different ages.
And that's not enough (for him).
Depression and anxiety affect women more than men.
In his exploration of the
genetic and environmental alterations behind stress
, he and his team now want to find an answer to a problem for which the pharmaceutical industry has not yet found a pill.
Why does the brain make some people
resilient
and others
susceptible
to anxiety, depression and even obesity and diabetes?
All health conditions affected by chronic stress, which are growing worldwide, especially in the young population.
“Men and women are responding differently to stress.
In behavior, but also at the level of the stress hormone, which is cortisol.
Why is it important to study the mechanism that produces stress
according to gender
?
Because the prevalence of conditions such as depression and anxiety is 2 to 3 times higher in
them
than in
them
,” Chen begins.
There is a pattern there to solve.
In the study published in Cell Reports last year, researchers from the joint laboratory of Weizmann and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich
looked
inside
the brain
- "we did it in mice, because they had to be removed," he explains - to find which Those were the differences.
Their finding was unprecedented due to the microscopic resolution with which they mapped the stress response depending on whether they were males or females.
Many times depression medication misses the mark and becomes a lot of "trial and error."
They showed that some cells are more susceptible to stress in women and others to stress in men.
And that prior exposure to stress modulates that response in a sex- and cell-type-dependent manner.
“We took the area of the brain that is very important for stress regulation (the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus) and discovered
molecular differences
in the way the genes of men and women respond to stress.
We already have an extra layer in the analysis of stress in the brain.
But, yes, we can go even deeper and ask
why the genes are responding so differently
,” she says.
Since that
paper,
the causes of these differences (which may be mediated in human evolution by exposure to different hormones, estrogen or testosterone) are not yet fully understood and
personalized treatments according to sex do not yet exist
.
The "big problem" that leads to an increase in mood disorders, he says, is that pharmacological treatment "like Prozac and all the antidepressants that followed it" does not distinguish between gender issues, nor by age, nor between people. .
The medication of the future
“Regardless of whether they are men or women, everyone is being treated the same way, which probably will not be the way depression and anxiety will be treated in 5 or 10 years,” he anticipates.
Today we have
a variety of medications
against mental problems, but most of them act on the same mechanisms in the brain: at the level of serotonin.
If the drug were really effective, the neuroscientist compares, it would work in minutes.
"Today you take an antidepressant and it takes
between 3 and 8 weeks
until it starts to work. And, after this time, only 50% of people respond to the treatment. There they take another medication, and then another, and another, which also doesn't work for them. works, and at the end of the year, 30% of that group still does not respond to any of them," Chen diagnoses.
What does the future of “tailored” medication for mental health look like?
“Each of us will probably be treated based on our DNA, based on
her
or
his
genetics , based on their epigenetics, their life experience and many other factors.”
Epigenetics is not in the
letter
of DNA but there are chemical modifications on the surface of that DNA that can resist even three generations.
“You can see in the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors epigenetic marks that their grandparents had,” she exemplifies.
They are a kind of genetic “signalers” of the effects of post-traumatic stress on health.
In the latest study published in
Science Advances
by this team, in December of last year, they showed that stress also affects people
differently.
depending on the age at which one is exposed
.
And detecting this trace of trauma in the young brain allows it to be reversed, thanks to brain plasticity.
"We saw (also in mice) that when you are exposed to stress in very early stages, even as an embryo and that exposure is through the mother, the social skills of that person when they reach adulthood
will be diminished
, they will not be leaders, "They will not have an alpha personality. They will be introverted and will show symptoms of social anxiety."
Why are laboratories missing the mark with the most widely effective drug against depression?
“The reason is very simple,
we still do not fully understand the brain.
We don't know exactly what depression is, what anxiety is, what schizophrenia is.
We understand the manifestation, we know what it means, we can define them, but the minute we do not understand the mechanism of why something is happening, we do not have a medication that can solve it,” she says.
That hides another pattern to resolve, beyond gender.
"If I have depression and you do too, the cause of each person's depression may respond to a different mechanism. Something is causing my depression and something else is causing yours. From the outside, we are both going to look equally depressed. No. We want to go to work, we stay in bed, or we still work while depressed, but the underground mechanism of that depression, what is causing it, is very different.
That's why this team really seeks
to understand the brain
.
What are the genes, proteins, brain circuits that are responsible for emotions such as sadness, fear or joy.
"There is nothing like 'the best treatment for depression or anxiety'. For different people, different combinations. Today in cancer we do know. We have the best chemotherapy for a certain tumor. We do not have it in depression.
The future is medicine of precision, also for mental illnesses
. We are not there yet," says the professor.
To put
brain
first
,
investment is also needed.
Research is expensive.
Pharmaceutical companies recently reinvested in mental health.
They had deposited a lot of money without results.
Today they work closely with research institutes to develop new treatments.
"The next decade is going to be
revolutionary
in mental health medications. They can make a lot of money. Because it is not a
rare disease
, there are tens of millions of people with these problems in the world. But that investment can also come from governments and private funds," Chen closes, without forgetting that the mental health crisis, cataloged as such by the World Health Organization (WHO) after the pandemic, is not just a market.
It is a public health issue.
P.S.