Dieter Lütticken Award Granted to Hans-Peter Ottiger

He is Head Quality Control and Deputy Head Vaccine Control at the Institute of Virology and Immunoprophylaxis, part of the Swiss Federal Veterinary Office in Mittelhäusern (Switzerland). He will receive the € 20,000 award, which is sponsored by Merck Animal Health for his trend-setting work on the development, optimization and standardization of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays in the extraneous agents testing of inactivated poultry vaccines.

Purity testing currently is an essential quality requirement of immunological veterinary medicinal products and the European Pharmacopoeia requires avian viral vaccines to be free of adventitious agents. Conventional virus detection methods for inactivated avian viral vaccines, laid out in current legislation, includes in vivo seroconversion testing in chicks. PCR testing has many advantages compared to conventional testing, including high specificity, fast turnaround times and it eliminates the use of live animals.

Dr. Ottiger said, “Viral safety is a key issue for veterinary vaccines. Molecular tests can be more sensitive and have a higher level of discrimination than conventional approaches involving experimental animals. They fulfill the requirements of the European Pharmacopoeia and have now been recognized to be a valid alternative method for extraneous agents testing in poultry vaccines."

“Now that the European Pharmacopoeia has proposed earlier this year to abandon the batch safety testing for inactivated vaccines using live animals, vaccine purity testing by PCR may significantly start to contribute to the 3R-principles”, added Prof. Coenraad Hendriksen, chair of the expert jury panel and Professor of Alternatives to Animal Testing at Utrecht University (the Netherlands).

Merck Animal Health sponsors the international Dieter Lütticken Award for alternatives in animal testing for veterinary medicines to support individual scientists and life sciences research institutions that make significant contributions to the 3R-concept, i.e. in reducing, refining and/or replacing the use of animals in testing for development and manufacturing of veterinary medicines.