Bianca Aterini, PhD candidate in Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano, has received the Ecopa Award for Young Scientists during the 59th Congress of the Federation of European Toxicologists and European Societies of Toxicology (EUROTOX 2025), held in Athens.
The award is presented by the European Consensus Platform for Alternatives (ECOPA), a non-profit organization that promotes the adoption of alternative research methods to animal testing, in accordance with the 3Rs principle: Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement.
As part of her research within the ANTHEM project, Aterini developed a three-dimensional in vitro model of the alveolar-capillary barrier of the lungs, created by applying human cells onto a synthetic silicone scaffold. This model — a true “lung-on-a-chip” — microscopically reproduces the mechanism by which oxygen passes from air into the bloodstream, allowing the observation of respiratory processes in a realistic and controlled environment.
The organ-on-a-chip technology, which serves as the inspiration for this project, has a wide range of applications, including drug screening, the study of processes underlying the onset of certain diseases, precision medicine, and, as in this case, toxicology. In particular, it allows researchers to test the effects of potentially toxic substances without the use of laboratory animals. From this perspective, the model developed by Aterini has already proven to be fully functional and represents a promising platform for studying the impact of pollutants on human health, while also offering a more ethical, effective, and cost-efficient alternative to traditional methods.
With the development and validation phases now completed, the next step of the research will focus on analysing the cellular response to exposure to various pollutants, in order to directly assess their effects on lung tissue.