Bertram Jacobs knew what he wanted to do as soon as he saw the advertisement from the National Institutes of Health. The 1991 announcement proclaimed that the NIH would fund research related to the transmission of HIV from mother to child.

An ASU professor of microbiology, Jacobs is an expert on interferon, a drug being tested as a treatment for AIDS patients. He wanted to find out what effect interferon might have on both a developing human fetus and on the placenta, the organ that protects and feeds a growing baby inside the womb.

There was one major problem: Jacobs’ ASU lab is located in Arizona, where experiments on human embryonic tissue are illegal. The solution was one common to science: improvise.

Jacobs’ first set of experiments was relatively simple to design. Mouse embryos had long been used as models for human development. But finding something to mimic the human placenta would be more difficult.

“Other than primates, interactions between the mother and the human placenta are very different than the interactions that take place between other animals and their placentas,” Jacobs explains. “Primates are in very short supply and very expensive to use for these studies. As a result, we were left trying to find another experimental model of how the human placenta works.”

The placenta grows from tissue that comes partly from the mother and partly from the fetus. Jacobs could not use aborted or miscarried placenta without risking a lawsuit. He turned to fellow ASU professors and scientists Robert McGaughey and David Capco for help.

McGaughey had done extensive research with physicians working at Good Samaritan Medical Center’s in vitro fertilization clinic. The ASU scientists were able to get placental tissue from women who had just given birth. Using the expertise developed in Capco’s laboratory, they used those samples to grow larger amounts of placental tissue in lab dishes. They then studied the effects of interferon on that newly grown tissue.

Getting cells to grow outside the body is not an easy task. Jacobs and his colleagues had several problems coaxing the tissue to grow into a continuous layer.

They persevered. Once successful, they found that interferon could halt the reproduction of several non-HIV viruses within the placental tissue. If the findings are extended to HIV, interferon might one day be used as a treatment to prevent HIV from being passed from mother to child.

Collaborative science can be a difficult process. But in this case, the cooperation between scientists from different disciplines paid off. Jacobs says that it would not have happened had the three researchers not met through ASU’s special program for molecular and cellular biology.

“I come from a biochemistry background. Biochemists like to cut things up and separate them and then ask how each piece works,” Jacobs explains. “That’s necessary and that’s good, but there comes a time when you have to ask how the whole thing works. That’s when collaboration becomes important.”—Alana Mikkelsen

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