Organoids instead of mice and the like: German scientists have received the Animal Welfare Research Award 2021 for their success in the production of nerve structures for experiments and drug testing. Their particular merit is the development of an automated breeding process, through which the brain models are standardized and produced in large numbers. The Federal Ministry of Agriculture (BMEL) justifies the award that they can replace laboratory animals to a considerable extent for research into neurological diseases and for drug tests.
Torturing animals is morally reprehensible and, under normal circumstances, prohibited. But there are exceptions to this rule, as is well known: animal suffering is accepted in animal experiments in basic research as well as for medical development. It is even required by law to test new active ingredients in animal experiments for effectiveness and side effects. In addition, animal experiments may be required to identify environmental impacts. So it is a necessary evil – which, however, needs to be limited as much as possible. The animal welfare research award, endowed with 25,000 euros, is dedicated to this goal. With this, the BMEL wants to honor and promote the development and research of alternative methods to animal experiments.
Less animal experiments in brain research
This year the committee decided to honor the successes of Jan Bruder and Henrik Renner from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster. You are working on the development of procedures that will benefit neurological research. So far, this has been an area in which there is a high need for animal experiments: In order to elucidate how nerve tissues work and to develop drugs against diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or depression, researchers use the brains of mice and others as models. This is often associated with hereditary suffering for the laboratory animals. There have already been attempts to switch to nerve cell cultures in experiments. But the conventional methods led to structures that could only be compared to a limited extent with human brain tissue.
For a few years now, however, a new process has found its way into brain research: the organoid technique. Pinhead-sized nerve structures are grown in the laboratory. They are formed from special neural precursor cells that spontaneously form pieces of tissue themselves and network in them in a complex manner. Thanks to their three-dimensional arrangement, they imitate the characteristic properties of natural brain tissue better than conventional cell cultures. However, the process was too inefficient and time-consuming for a broad use and thus a possible replacement for test animals, since the organoids had to be manufactured individually by hand.
Fully automated production
An important success of the work of Bruder and Renner is now the development of a process by which organoids from different brain regions can be grown a thousand times in parallel and made usable for the development of active substances. In a fully automatic process, the scientists use a pipetting robot to generate large numbers of the seedlings of the structures. Thanks to the uniformity, standardized organoids are then formed from them, which are particularly suitable for research into diseases and tests of active substances on nerve tissue.
Progress with an animal welfare effect is particularly important for Parkinson’s research: “With our midbrain organoids, we can observe the death of dopaminergic nerve cells in an active, human brain-like tissue – the same cells that are also prone to damage in Parkinson’s disease . They have great potential to become the next generation of a novel disease model for this disease. We can also determine the effects of poisons such as pesticides on the organoids fully automatically, ”says Bruder.
“I assume that in the medium term our system will make at least some of the animal experiments in neurological and pharmacological research superfluous. Active ingredients that have a toxic effect in our test system or are not sufficiently effective could be excluded from development at an early stage and would no longer have to be tested in animals at all ”. Brother and Renner can now look forward to a grant of 25,000 euros for their further development work with an effect on animal welfare.