Rutgers Opens Brand-New Placenta Research Center In Piscataway

PISCATAWAY, NJ — How does the placenta keep harmful substances away from developing babies while still providing proper nutrition?

Believe it or not, the exact mechanisms of how the placenta works remain unknown, which is why Rutgers is teaming up with other schools to launch a brand-new placenta research center, funded by the National Institute of Health.

Rutgers will team up with four other universities to form the new research center, located in Piscataway. One of the main goals of their research is to detect problems with the placenta sooner, possibly saving lives of developing babies.

Rutgers University, Tulane University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Rochester will operate the center. It is funded by a $5-million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The placenta research center is officially called the Integrated Transporter Elucidation Center (InTEC), and it will operate from the Rutgers Biomedical Health Sciences campus in Piscataway under the leadership of Lauren Aleksunes, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Rutgers’ Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy.

She is also a resident scientist in the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute.

“Since my time working as a community pharmacist, I have found the lack of high-quality information about the safety of everyday products on the health of a pregnancy frustrating," she said. "People need to know whether the chemicals in their diet, personal care products, and medications can impact their babies. Our goal at InTEC is to better understand how these chemicals travel in and out of the placenta and if they can reach the baby and influence their development."

Her team, which includes five other Rutgers researchers, will study how transporter proteins carrying nutrients, dietary supplements, medications and toxic chemicals work during pregnancies.

Some of the work will test how individual placenta cells respond to various stimuli in the laboratory. Others on the team will examine how environmental factors influence placental transporters during healthy and unhealthy or complicated pregnancies.

Another team operating under Hao Zhu at Tulane will use machine learning and computer science approaches to identify new interactions between transporter proteins and chemicals. A third team operating under Dan Huh at Penn will use an innovative model — a vascularized placenta-on-a-chip — to simulate the transfer of molecules across the human placenta.

Researchers led by Jacqueline Tiley at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will use tools they developed to identify relevant proteins and how those proteins can be monitored in the blood across pregnancy.

More importantly, they hope their work leads to more healthy pregnancies and children.