The founder's take on our vision
‍

The central questions that fuel my research did not emerge in the lab. They come from the patients I have had the privilege of serving over the past twenty plus years as a physician. One woman in particular stands out among them all. A 24 year old woman with untreated HIV infection and advanced addiction to cocaine and heroin who was living in a tent encampment beneath Lower Wacker Drive located under Chicago’s Magnificent Mile just blocks away from Northwestern Memorial Hospital where I met her. ‍The day after a positive pregnancy test, she walked into the infectious disease clinic at Northwestern seeking antiretroviral treatment for the first time. It wasn’t for herself, but for the life she was carrying. Over seven weeks of hospitalization, I watched her motivations reorganize entirely. She spoke about her daughter-to-be the way any expectant mother would. Her baby was born healthy and HIV-negative, and was named after me, an honor that humbles me to this day.

That experience made a question impossible to ignore: what exactly changed in this mother's brain over these weeks, making her rethink the opportunity of addiction treatment? And, why couldn't we make it last?I am Suena Huang Massey, M.D., an addiction psychiatrist, clinician investigator, and founder of Sisternet.  I have spent my career asking the questions that tend to get left behind. Not why are drugs so powerful, but rather what conditions allow everything else to compete. Not why do people relapse, but what is the biology beneath the moments when they don't. Pregnancy, I came to understand, is one of nature's most powerful and underexamined experiments: the brain temporarily reweights its entire reward hierarchy. It amplifies caregiving drive and attenuates risk-seeking in ways that reveal the very levers we need to find for widespread recovery benefit. My work lives at the intersection of addiction neuroscience, reproductive biology, and social science — asking what drives that shift, and whether it can be harnessed.The dominant narrative in addiction science has long held that drug use hijacks the brain — permanently, catastrophically, hopelessly. I believe that framing is both scientifically incomplete and quietly cruel. Rodent studies show that rats with extensive drug exposure will choose the company of another rat over cocaine, given a genuine alternative. Pregnancy shows that human motivational systems can reorganize dramatically under the right biological conditions. The tragedy is not that recovery is impossible. The tragedy is that we dismantle the conditions that make it possible — stable housing, social support, continuity of care — precisely when they matter most. At Sisternet, our work is guided by curiosity, integrity, and a deep belief that understanding the biology of change is also an act of justice.

Sisternet exists because these questions are too urgent and too interconnected for any one investigator to carry alone. We are building a laboratory culture rooted in deep trust, shared investment, and genuine collaboration across disciplines. We believe that breakthroughs emerge not from isolated brilliance, but from the right conditions — and that the same principle that governs our science governs our community. Women like the one from Lower Wacker Drive have shown us what is possible. We owe them the science to understand it, and the treatments to sustain it.

~ Suena Massey, M.D.


‍