Professor Fritsche works at the Leibniz Institute for Environmental Medical Research at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. She is also head of the Centre for Alternative Methods to Animal Experimentation (CERST) in Düsseldorf. With her team she has developed the neurosphere assay on the basis of neuronal progenitor cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. The neurosphere assay can be used to investigate the effects of environmental chemicals on the developing brain of an unborn child (so-called developmental neurotoxicity). So far, this test has been conducted on pregnant rodents. The Neurosphere assay has the perspective to reduce animal experiments. Due to the use of induced pluripotent stem cells from humans, the results are more relevant than animal experiments, whose results cannot be clearly transferred to the human situation because of species differences.

Private lecturer Dr Hamid Reza Noori from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen is a mathematician and physician. He uses new approaches from mathematics, data mining and machine learning to evaluate the large amount of published data from neurobiological research projects in rats over the last few decades. Through a complex analysis of existing data, he was able to elucidate the biochemical circuits of information processing in the rat brain.

The Ursula M. Händel Animal Protection Research Prize, which honoures outstanding scientists every two years, will be awarded on 23 November during the opening of the new research centre "Charité 3R - Replace, Reduce and Refine".

Location is the lecture hall ruins of the Berlin Medical History Museum of the Charité.

Source:
https://idw-online.de/de/news699785