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AAALAC and IQ Consortium announce 2016 Global 3Rs Award recipients

2016 recipients of their Global 3Rs Awards  presented by AAALAC Executive Director Dr Kathryn Bayne, and IQ 3Rs Leadership Group member, Dr Dale Martin, to three winners at the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS) National Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. Th ree winners are Dr Olivier Frey, Dr Madhav Paranjpe and Dr Ben Quah

The Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) and the Consortium for Innovation and Quality in Pharmaceutical Development (IQ) have announced the 2016 recipients of their Global 3Rs Awards

This program recognises recent research papers which make significant innovative contributions towards the 3Rs.

Awards of $5,000 (USD) each were presented by AAALAC Executive Director Dr Kathryn Bayne, and IQ 3Rs Leadership Group member, Dr Dale Martin, to three winners at the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS) National Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.

Dr Olivier Frey, ETH Zurich, Switzerland was recognised for his work, reported in Journal of Biotechnology, illustrating the capability and the versatility of multi-cellular spheroid-based microfluidic platforms to reproduce systemic drug interactions in the human body that involve multiple tissue types. By combining primary rat liver spheroids and a tumour spheroid on the same microchip, Dr Frey was able to reproduce the effects of the cancer therapeutic pro-drug cyclophosphamide, which in the human body first has to be activated by the liver before acting on cancer. Conventional well cultures and discrete pipetting, in contrast, failed to reproduce these results. Up to 100,000 identical organotypic liver spheroids can be formed from cells isolated from a single rat liver.

Dr Madhav Paranjpe of BioReliance, Rockville, Maryland, USA received his award for a paper published in Toxicologic Pathology which supports reduction by 25% of the number of mice required to evaluate the carcinogenic potential of new pharmaceuticals. His investigation and detailed analyses of 29 studies using Tg.rasH2 mice provides critical evidence for the elimination of the high dose group (Maximum Tolerated Dose) from carcinogenicity bioassays using these transgenic mice, without loss of data required for regulatory decision-making.

Dr Ben Quah of the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia won the award in the Pacific Rim category. Dr Quah and colleagues have developed an assay, based on advanced flow cytometry technology, for the multi-parameter screening of T and B lymphocytes post-vaccination in mice. His winning paper, published in PLOS ONE, describes use of the assay as a cost effective screening tool to evaluate a large range of HIV-1 vaccination strategies, reducing the required number of mice by over 100 fold. The same quality of immunological data generated from a total of 6,426 animals using a traditional 2-parameter assay can be now generated from only 45 animals, via the 252-parameter fluorescent target array (FTA) assay.

Chair of the Global 3Rs Awards selection committee, Dr Mark Prescott, NC3Rs said:

I am delighted the Global 3Rs Awards program has been supported for a second year. The standard of the entries continues to be very high, and so the job of the 2016 selection committee was not an easy one. The winning papers describe first class science with strong 3Rs potential. On behalf of the committee, I congratulate the award recipients for their excellent work.”