The Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) has received a $6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a consortium to develop a new technological methodology for mapping the molecular pathways of toxicity within cells.

Researchers under the leadership of Preben Boysen from the Norway University of Veterinary Sciences in Oslo have found that laboratory mice raised in a sterilized environments have less killer cells (NK cells) in their immune system than humans or members of the same species raised in the wild. This results is therrefore of particular interest because it shows that scientific results obtained from experiments on mice cannot be reliable transferred to humans.

For the first time a research team under the direction of Eduard Batlle from the Institute of Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Barcelona in cooperation with Hans Clevers from University Medical Center in Utrecht succeeded in finding the site in the colon in which  the stem cells are located.

Scientists from the Helmholtz Centre of Infection Research (HZI) and the Helmholtz Institute of Pharmaceutical Research (HIPS), Saarland, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Claus-Michael Lehr want to convert lung cells from mice into a stable model to investigate the penetration of pathogens (viruses or bacteria) and to test new drugs.