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Congratulations to the winners of the Lush Prize 2026

At an Awards Ceremony in London, UK, in May, twelve winning projects and four commended projects were celebrated by an audience of campaigners, scientists, politicians and others.

Sharing the £250,000 prize fund, these twelve projects, from ten countries, were selected by the independent panel of judges as representing outstanding work to end the use of animals in research, testing and education.

Prize Winners

The Lush Prize 2026 for Science, with £50,000 funding, was awarded to the Biosensing, Microfluidics, and Microsystems Team at the Wyss Institute of Harvard University, USA. Their human organ chips for women’s health research addresses an area of research that is currently under-funded.

The Public Awareness Prize was shared by two organisations, receiving £25,000 each. Animal-Free Science Advocacy, from Australia, won for their ‘Honour Me With a Name’ campaign that used Freedom of Information releases to highlight how primates in research labs are housed and used. Canadian organisation Animal Justice won a prize for their work with whistleblowers to expose conditions at St. Joseph’s Hospital’s animal research lab, and the subsequent campaign to ban the use of dogs and cats in research.

Two Latin American non-animal research labs shared the Training Prize, receiving £25,000 each: Dr Silvya Engler from Brazil and the Laboratorio de Métodos Alternativos in Argentina, both training other scientists across the region on non-animal methods of research.

Lindsey Borton and Dr Kelly Coleman from the USA won the £50,000 Political Advocacy Prize for their work to eliminate the use of the rabbit pyrogen test for medical devices.

The non-financial Major Science Collaboration Prize was awarded to the Animal-Free Safety Assessment (AFSA) Collaboration. AFSA is a multi-sector partnership working to advance acceptance and use of animal-free safety science as a gold standard across regulatory frameworks worldwide.

Five awards of £10,000 each were given to Young Researchers under 35 years old:
Dr Adam Fellows, Royal Veterinary College, UK
Dr Alicja Mikołajczyk, University of Gdansk, Poland
Dr Jonne Rietdijk, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, USA, and Uppsala University, Sweden
Dr Marion Revel, Eawag – Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Switzerland
Dr Rahul Rimal, EMPA, Switzerland