Alternative methods to animal studies

The board of the Einstein Foundation approved the preliminary stage of a new Einstein Center for the development of alternative methods for animal testing in biomedical research. The aim of the planned center is to reduce or replace animal experiments. It will be established in cooperation with the MDC.

Dr. Jana Wolf heads the Mathematical Modeling of Cellular Processes Lab at the MDC. On June 15 she will begin a professorship at FU Berlin . She looks forward to exchanging expertise and ideas with her new colleagues – and to leveraging this knowledge to develop new medical models.

MDC researchers established a new model to study neuromuscular development and disorders. For the first time two distinct human tissues co-developed in the lab from one progenitor cell type and self-organized into a complex, functional neuromuscular organoid.

A new technology platform at the Max Delbrück Center is using human stem cells to develop complex tissue cultures known as “organoids.” This enables researchers to gain a better understanding of disease processes by simulating them in 3D. Neuronal diseases will be modeled first and then other diseases.

There are people who are open about the fact that they conduct experiments on animals – and claim they have good reasons for doing so. On November 5 in Berlin’s Urania theater, they fielded questions from the general public and injected reason into a debate often driven by emotion.

MDC researcher Dr. Stephan Preibisch and a team of scientists from Berlin, Bochum, and Düsseldorf have won the first round of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s “In Vitro Challenge.” The goal of the competition is to find clever alternatives to testing on laboratory animals. One bright idea is miniature organs created from human stem cells.

During the "Long Night of Sciences" on June 15, visitors can see something that hardly anyone has seen before - simply because it is still so new: spinal cord neurons and skeletal muscle tissue that have been cultivated together from stem cells.