The paper by Fernando Romero-Palomo, Matthias Festag, Barbara Lenz, Simone Schadt, Andreas Brink, Anja Kipar, Bernd Steinhuber, Christophe Husser, Erich Koller, Sabine Sewing, Yann Tessier, Pawel Dzygiel, Guy Fischer, Michael Winter, Udo Hetzel, Michael J. Mihatsch, and Annamaria Braendli-Baiocco (2021). Safety, Tissue Distribution, and Metabolism of LNA-containing Antisense Oligonucleotides in Rats. Toxicologic Pathology 49(6) 1174-1192 (doi:10.1177/01926233211011615), was selected as recipient of the ESTP 2022 publication prize.
These locked nucleic acid (LNA)-containing antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) were either unconjugated (naked) or conjugated with N-acetylgalactosamine for hepatocyte-targeted delivery. In this paper the authors investigated the toxicity of different tool ASOs using a variety of techniques.

In addition a special best thesis award was given for the thesis of Vanessa Vrolyk (2022): Postnatal ocular development in laboratory animals: A histological and immunohistochemical study. This thesis was conducted at the Université de Montréal, Département de pathologie et microbiologie, Faculté de médecine vétérinaire in collaboration with Charles River Laboratories. This thesis investigated the postnatal ocular development from birth to the peripubertal stage in Sprague Dawley rats, domestic pigs, Göttingen minipigs and beagle dogs. The results of the thesis have been published in various papers and presentations.