Karyn Frick likes to think big. In college, she spent the summer after her junior year studying the neurobiology of memory in a lab at Johns Hopkins University. For hours at a time, Frick would watch rats scurry through mazes, entranced by their behavior.
For Frick, that early experience sparked an interest in memory that would ripple throughout her career. Years later, in a study on mice, she observed that middle-aged females were mentally older — and had worse memory — than their male counterparts. Now a neuroscientist and professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she’s working to study how estrogens regulate our memories and brain function.
Her big-picture goal? To better understand how the brain forms memories — and use those insights to develop new treatments for age-related memory loss and dementia.
From biology to neuroscience and beyond
When she was younger, Frick was drawn to marine biology. “I just thought sea creatures were really cool,” she said.
In college, Frick followed her interest in biology more broadly. When she took an entry-level psychology class, she also became fascinated with the brain. She earned a joint degree in psychology and biology from Franklin & Marshall College in 1991.
Then, as a graduate student, Frick went back to the same lab at Johns Hopkins University where she worked in college, becoming swept up in the lab’s work on memory and aging. In 1996, she graduated with a PhD in behavioral neuroscience.
“The reason I was so interested in memory is because it’s so personal — our unique set of memories is what makes each of us us,” Frick said. “I think about my own two kids, who were raised in the same household, but each has their own memories that make them very unique individuals.”
While doing postdoctoral research at Wellesley College, and then later as a faculty member at Yale University, Frick began exploring how memory formation may differ in males and females, and whether aging might disparately impact memory loss in the sexes. That led to the discovery that middle-aged females performed more poorly on memory-related tasks than middle-aged males and younger males and females — and to Frick’s focus on estrogen today.
Exploring estrogen and memory loss
At UWM, Frick has continued to dig deeper into the role of estrogens in regulating memory. In her Neuroendocrinology of Memory Lab, Frick is exploring —along with colleagues and students — how estrogens work in the brain to enhance memory formation in both sexes. The lab’s research also investigates how the loss of estrogens during menopause can lead to symptoms like hot flashes and memory loss.
That basic research led Frick to co-found Estrigenix Therapeutics Inc. Established in 2018, the pharmaceutical company is focused on developing estrogen-like drugs for menopausal women that provide benefits to memory and hot flashes while sidestepping the harmful side effects of other hormone therapies. These side effects can include higher rates of breast and uterine cancers in some women.
“On the drug development front, our goal is to license at least one of these compounds to a (pharmaceutical) partner who could take it through clinical trials,” Frick said. “And the dream would be to get it to market so that it can be one of an arsenal of tools that women have to address their menopausal symptoms.”
Although Frick’s lab’s research focuses on women, estrogens can act as a shield against memory deficits in both men and women. As such, the hope of her research is to unravel the role estrogens play in regulating memory — and, in doing so, help develop estrogen-like compounds to combat memory loss in both sexes.
“The work is important because it won’t just help us to understand how memories are formed,” Frick said. “We hope that it will also help further drug-development efforts to provide additional options for folks who may have normal age-related memory loss or neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.”
