2025 Brain Prize winners, Michelle Monje of Stanford Medicine and Frank Winkler of Heidelberg University Hospital, made clear that animal research remains essential to their work. 

In an FENS article, based on an interview with Tierversuche verstehen, the researchers were highlighted as being awarded for their work showing how healthy neurons interact with brain cancer cells, helping to change how scientists understand these tumours. 

Animal research is crucial in both neuroscience and cancer research because brain cancer cannot be studied properly in isolation, and researchers need to study tumour cells within the full complexity of a living brain, where cancer cells, nerve cells and surrounding tissue and environment all affect one another. 

Winkler said: “Of course, as scientists, we have a duty to treat living beings and the truth responsibly. We try to reduce animal experiments as much as possible. We don’t do animal testing because we are stubborn. We actively look for alternatives and use them. But some relationships can only be properly understood in animals, and we want to protect patients from being exposed to pointless, ineffective therapy trials. Animal testing can be used, for example, to find out: If I administer a substance, does it really reach the brain and have an effect there? No other model can really do that very well.” 

The Brain Prize has been awarded by the Lundbeck Foundation to 51 researchers since 2011 and is the world’s largest prize for brain research, with 1.3 million euros awarded. The 2026 winners, David Ginty, from Harvard Medical School, and Patrik Ernfors, from Karolinksa Institutet, an EARA member, were honoured for work on how the nervous system detects touch and pain, also using animal studies, namely mice.