The State Prize for the Promotion of Alternative Methods to Animal Experiments 2023 will be awarded to Anna-Dorothea Gorki. She is an expert in respiratory infections, trained at the Research Centre for Molecular Medicine (CeMM, Austrian Academy of Sciences) and at the Medical University of Vienna. She has been Chief Scientific Officer of the company G.ST Antivirals since 2020.
The prize recognises outstanding scientific work whose results or objective is to avoid or reduce the use of animals in animal experiments or to improve the conditions for breeding, housing, care and use of animals in animal experiments.
Minister of Science Martin Polaschek congratulates: “With her work, she shows how excellent scientific research in the important field of alternative methods to animal experiments can succeed. The prize is intended to encourage the researchers to continue their commitment to replacement method research in the future, and the prize is intended to generate attention so that more researchers devote themselves to this topic.”
Anna-Dorothea Gorki receives the State Prize for Replacement Methods to Animal Experiments for her publication “Murine Ex vivo cultured alveolar macrophages provide a novel tool to study tissue-resident macrophage behavior and function”. As an alternative to animal models, the award winner uses a novel cell culture protocol to cultivate macrophages isolated from the mouse lung for over 6 months, thus preventing fresh isolations from mice for each experiment. Follow this link to the publication: https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/10.1165/rcmb.2021-0190OC
The federal government has set itself the goal of promoting and accelerating the development of alternative methods to animal experiments and has decided, among other things, to award an annual state prize for the promotion of alternative methods to animal experiments.
The State Prize for the Promotion of Alternative Methods to Animal Experiments is awarded annually by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research on the recommendation of an expert jury for outstanding scientific work whose results or objective, in the sense of the “3R principle” (replace, reduce, refine) according to Russell and Burch (1959), is to avoid or reduce the use of animals in animal experiments or to improve the conditions for breeding, housing, care and use of animals in animal experiments. The State Prize is endowed with 10,000 Euros.
