This time, two prestigious research awards from the Center for Alternative to Animal Testing (CAAT) at the Bloomberg School of Medicine in Baltimore go to two German teams for their commitment to non-animal methods.

Biomedical scientist Prof. Maike Frye takes over the chair on 3R methods at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE). With her Vascular Biology group, the scientist is developing novel hydrogel techniques for culture systems of human cells. The aim is to recreate tissue environments of vascular endothelial cells. 

At the end of December 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the "FDA Modernization Act 2.0." Under this law, it is no longer necessary to test the safety of drugs on animals in order to obtain approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the government agency that oversees food, drugs, and medical devices. This could initiate a significant reduction in animal testing after more than 80 years of safety testing of drugs on animals.

A team from Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS in Dresden as well as from Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) is using an organ-on-a-chip to explore the possibilities of fighting persistent tumors with the help of radioactive substances.