Once again, the Senate Department for Justice, Consumer Protection and Anti-Discrimination, the State Office for Health and Social Affairs (LaGeSo) as well as the Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (vfa) are offering the "Alternatives to Animal Testing" research prize of the State of Berlin to promote the development of replacement and supplementary methods.

Using cell cultures, scientists at the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut and the Marburg University Hospital have investigated the interactions between retrotransposons and the hepatitis C virus (HCV). They found that HCV infection can restrict human LINE-1 retrotransposition into cells.

Scientists from the Institute of Molecular Virology at the University of Ulm, Germany, have studied in vitro how the SARS-Cov-2 virus paralyzes the immune system by shutting down antiviral signaling pathways.

Using in vitro cell cultures, scientists from the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix, Arizona, have shown that the blood-brain barrier ABC transporter ABCC1 is not only capable of exporting the feared amyloid-ß from the cytoplasm of human cells. Its overexpression can even significantly reduce amyloid-ß production.