Herbert Stiller Prize for animal-free research awarded to the University of Greifswald
- Press release
Doctors Against Animal Experiments supports innovative bladder-cancer-on-a-chip model
Doctors Against Animal Experiments (DAAE) presented Dr. Pedro Caetano Pinto from the University of Greifswald with this year’s Herbert Stiller Prize for excellent animal-free research. Dr. Pinto received the award for his innovative project developing a human bladder-on-a-chip model to study bladder cancer. This approach offers a much-needed, entirely animal-free research model that, unlike conventional and particularly distressing animal experiments, is human-based. The award ceremony took place in Greifswald.
Herbert Stiller Prize
The Herbert Stiller Prize is presented every two years and honors outstanding, innovative research that relies exclusively on animal-free, human-based materials and methods, providing important impulses for medical science. The award is endowed with €20,000 and financed through a dedicated donation. It is named after Dr. Herbert Stiller (1923–1985), a neurologist and psychiatrist and founding member of Doctors Against Animal Experiments.
Innovative model for bladder cancer research
Bladder cancer is one of the most common cancers of the urinary tract. Advancing treatment options and improving understanding of disease progression are essential for patients. Until now, bladder-cancer research has mostly relied on rodents—despite the fact that they do not adequately reflect the human disease and the experiments cause considerable suffering. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, nearly 9,000 animals were used for bladder-cancer research in Germany.
The award-winning project aims to create, for the first time, a bladder model that reproduces the human bladder tissue with its three-layer structure—epithelium, connective tissue, and muscle. The model uses only human cells and animal-free materials. It enables detailed investigation of tumor growth and metastasis, immune system interactions, and testing of new therapies. This allows drugs to be tested more precisely and with greater clinical relevance, and the model can also be personalized—for example, using cells from individual patients.
Award ceremony in Greifswald
During the award ceremony, Dr. Katharina Feuerlein, board member of DAAE, and Dr. Dilyana Filipova, scientific officer at DAAE and jury member for the Herbert Stiller Prize, praised Dr. Pinto’s exceptional commitment to developing modern and sustainable research methods.
“Dr. Pinto’s project impressively demonstrates that medical progress and animal welfare are not contradictory,” said Dr. Katharina Feuerlein. “The new bladder-on-a-chip model has the potential to spare countless animals worldwide from cruel experiments—and at the same time provide patients with scientifically better and safer results.”
“Despite clear ethical and scientific limitations, animal experiments remain the standard method in bladder-cancer research. Our human bladder-on-a-chip model will offer a way to completely replace rats and mice in bladder-cancer studies. From a technical standpoint, our model is being developed to ensure easy implementation, user-friendly operation, and cost-effectiveness to facilitate adoption by researchers who wish to move away from animal experiments,” explained award recipient Dr. Pedro Pinto.
Modern, human-focused, animal-free research offers enormous potential for gaining better insights into diseases and developing new therapies. Unfortunately, adequate public funding is still lacking—less than one percent of government biomedical research funding in Germany goes to these forward-looking projects.
“With the Herbert Stiller Award, we can only support a small portion of this urgently needed research, which should actually be funded by the state,” noted Dr. Dilyana Filipova. “We receive numerous outstanding applications with each call for proposals—there are many dedicated researchers with innovative projects who likewise deserve funding and recognition. We therefore strongly urge public research funders to support significantly more of these excellent, human-based projects.”
Herbert Stiller Prize Award ceremony in Greifswald. From left: Dr Arnt Ebinger (Head of Local Staff Unit NUM, University Medical Centre Greifswald), Dr Katharina Feuerlein (Board of Doctors Against Animal Experiments), Dr Dilyana Filipova (Scientific officer at Doctors Against Animal Experiments), award winner Dr Pedro Pinto (University Medical Centre Greifswald) and Prof. Martin Burchardt (Head of the Clinic and Polyclinic for Urology at the University Medical Centre Greifswald).
The DAAE delegation, the prize winner and his working group.
The images can be used free of charge. Reference: Doctors Against Animal Experiments.