3Rs Awards 2021 go to researchers at the University of Bern

The Swiss 3RCC has awarded Bernhard Voelkl from the Vetsuisse Faculty of the University of Bern the 2021 3Rs Award in recognition of his work supporting researchers to better design animal studies to improve research quality and reduce animal use. The 2021 3Rs Young Investigator Award went to Pauline Zamprogno from the ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering Research, also at the University of Bern, for her contribution to a lung-on-chip model, which aim at replacing animals testing. With their research the awardees not only help promote the 3Rs principle, which aims to replace, reduce and refine animal experiments, they communicated their projects in an exemplary manner to encourage other researchers to adopt these novel approaches in their work. Bernhard Voelkl and his colleagues at the Animal Welfare Division of the Veterinary Public Health Institute recommend that scientists introduce biological variation such as different mouse strains, sex or housing conditions into their animal experiments to improve the quality and reproducibility of their results. Traditionally animal studies are conducted under highly standardized laboratory conditions, which was meant to improve their quality. Paradoxically, such studies are more difficult to replicate by other scientists. Adding variability allows researchers to improve the reproducibility and translatability of their results.