Lush Prize at the Pan-American Conference for Alternative Methods

In mid-April, as part of the Lush Prize outreach work to scientists we attended the Pan-American Conference for Alternative Methods, hosted by The Centre for Alternatives to Animal Testing. CAAT is based at Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The conference, held over three days, allowed attendees to hear a number of presentations which aimed to address ‘The 6Rs’ – in addition to the well-known criteria of ‘Reduction’, Refinement’ and ‘Replacement’ of animal experiments (3Rs), further interesting areas of ‘Roadmaps’, ‘Relevance’ and ‘Read-Across’ were covered.

This was the first conference of its kind hosted by CAAT as part of its 35-year anniversary and the centennial of the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

A key message of the conference was that innovative alternative methods will protect people as well as animals in chemicals safety testing. CAAT, a former Lush Prize winner, works with all major industry stakeholders to develop non-animal methods.

CAAT aims for its first Pan-American event to provide a good starting point to team up with other countries (e.g. Canada) to develop further initiatives. Also of particular positive note was the attendance of researchers from Cuba for the first time.

As part of its exciting international outreach strategy for 2016, Lush Prize networked with a number of contacts to raise awareness of the award categories and engage with potential nominees.

(CAAT-Europe won the Lush Prize Award for Lobbying in 2014 and Dr Lena Smirnova of CAAT-USA won a Young Researcher Prize in 2015).