Limit medical experiments on chimps

Science should halt medical experiments on chimpanzees, the closest cousins to humans in the animal world, except perhaps for preventive vaccines for Hepatitis C and some drug therapies where there are no better alternatives, an expert panel concluded Thursday.

Booie, who died this week at age 44, kicked a smoking habit at the animal sanctuary near Los Angeles where he lived after retiring from a research lab.The Institute of Medicine told the U.S. government Thursday that chimpanzees should hardly ever be used for medical research.

By Dave Welling, AP

Booie, who died this week at age 44, kicked a smoking habit at the animal sanctuary near Los Angeles where he lived after retiring from a research lab.The Institute of Medicine told the U.S. government Thursday that chimpanzees should hardly ever be used for medical research.

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By Dave Welling, AP

Booie, who died this week at age 44, kicked a smoking habit at the animal sanctuary near Los Angeles where he lived after retiring from a research lab.The Institute of Medicine told the U.S. government Thursday that chimpanzees should hardly ever be used for medical research.
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The Institute of Medicine report, headed by bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, comes after years of disagreement between animal rights advocates and medical researchers over the 937 research chimps held at five institutions nationwide.

Fundamentally, the report said that medical experiments on chimps should only be done to advance public health in cases where no other lab animals would serve.

"I have decided to accept the Institute of Medicine report recommendations," National Institutes of Health chief Francis Collins said Thursday, following release of the report. "Effective immediately, NIH will not issue any awards for research involving chimps," Collins said, until new rules that follow the report recommendations are made. He estimated that half of the 110 NIH-supported medical research projects, studying hepatitis, malaria and other ailments, would end as a result.

For decades, U.S. medical researchers have relied upon chimps to test drugs, perform medical experiments such as vaccine safety and conduct behavioral tests on the species most closely related to humanity. Most notably, chimp studies led to advances in understanding malaria and in identifying Hepatitis C, a disease that chronically infects more than 130 million people worldwide and can lead to liver cancer, according to the World Health Organization.

However, efforts to breed research chimps for NASA's 1960s' space race and later for HIV research, seen as a bust because chimps are immune to the disease, left a glut of chimps at test facilities. That led to a moratorium on breeding in 1995. .

As a cost-cutting measure, the National Institutes of Health last year proposed shipping 186 chimps retired from research to a Texas facility where they could become medical experiment subjects. The proposed move angered animal rights advocates such as chimp researcher Jane Goodall, and led NIH to request the report from the congressionally chartered institute.

"Most current use of chimpanzees for biomedical research is unnecessary," the panel concludes after reviewing medical and behavioral problems among chimps subjected to experiments. The 12-expert panel suggested few ongoing drug tests justified chimp experiments, largely because other animals or human tests worked just as well, and divided over preventive hepatitis vaccine experiments on chimps.

"The bar is very high," Kahn said, at a briefing on the report, on whether any future invasive medical experiments, where chimps are infected or experimentally vaccinated, should be conducted. Gabon is the only other country that permits chimp medical experiments.

"If chimpanzees were not available for research, science would still go forward," says infectious disease expert Stephen Barthold of the University of California, Davis, who reviewed the report but was not on the panel. "The report emphasized that the current need for chimpanzees in research is minimal or non-existent …."

The 2005 mapping of the chimp genome shows the ape species diverged from human ancestry within the last 7 million years and can be considered about 99% genetically similar to people. This close relatedness of the chimps not only makes it "a uniquely valuable species for certain types of research, but also demand(s) a greater justification for their use in research," the panel said.

"The very same reason why chimpanzees are biomedically important, they are so like us, offers excellent moral reasons against their use," says primate researcher Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta. The panel report said behavioral research on chimps, particularly ones that might help spread disease (which de Waal conducts), should only be allowed in cases where the same research could be performed ethically on people, as well.

The panel did not consider the cost of maintaining chimps, which can live almost as long as people, but both Barthold and de Waal suggest that expense also argues against continuing chimp medical experiments. Collins, however, said that chimps cost NIH only about $45 a day to house, and suggested that some population of chimps would be maintained in case "future pandemics" require their use in medical research, a possibility allowed for in the report.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/story/2011-12-15/chimps-medical-research/51968844/1?csp=ip