With few exceptions, the Jacobs group does not work with crude extracts but focuses rather on studies of pure compounds that were initially isolated by collaborators. In its work to identify and understand products that may prove useful as treatments for inflammatory diseases such as arthritis, the group is involved with some conventional work using mammalian models. However, Jacobs' main focus has been on identifying and using unique model organisms that exhibit processes analogous to certain human reactions involved in these diseases. One key interest has been working with ciliates„single-celled organisms that propel themselves with hair-like cilia. Despite their simplicity, ciliates have such useful characteristics as receptors that respond to morphine, and protein systems that engulf foreign bodies in a fashion analogous to white blood cells in humans.

One of the key benefits of studying drug activity in ciliates, according to Jacobs, is that the work is supremely reproducible, because it is not difficult to work with a million of the microscopic organisms at a time. "You get enormously stable statistics," says Jacobs," and you can get a very thorough, in-depth study done in a matter of a year or two. You'll never do that in a million mice." Once an interesting physiological response analogous to a response of interest in humans is identified in the ciliates, it gives the team a rationale for further drug testing. Jacobs says this approach has a number of benefits over the standard model of screening large numbers of chemicals for their effects on various kinds of cells in bioassays, which, he says, gives only a hint of which bioactive compounds have the most promise. "The question they have to answer is, with so much data, how do they pick which one they're going to do the mechanism work on?" This process is so costly, he says, that it accounts for the loss of many new start-up biotech companies. "It's so expensive for them to try and go into so many different directions at once," he says.