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‘Courage in Lab’ Award for Geny Groothuis
Prof Geny Groothuis has been awarded this year's 'Courage in Lab' Award. She received the award for the successful development of using human tissues to replace animal testing in medical research. Groothuis was chosen out of tree other contestants; she received almost half of the more than six thousand votes.
Derived from organs during surgery, Geny Groothuis uses very thin slices of human tissue to test metabolism and toxicity of drugs and to simulate disease processes to test new drugs against diseases. These slices can be kept alive in the laboratory artificially.
Geny Groothuis is a researcher at Top Institute Pharma and involved in the projects Nanoscience and blood-brain barrier penetration and Biomarkers for adverse drug toxicity. She has studied Biochemistry at the University of Groningen (RUG). In 1998 she received the Hugo van Poelgeest Award for developing alternatives to animal testing.