ShareThisBiomedical research on chimpanzees -- closest cousins to humans -- is no longer needed to support medical advances in most fields and should be allowed to continue with federal support only under the most stringent conditions, an expert advisory panel said Thursday.
The report from the Institute of Medicine at the National Academies of Science affects the future of more than 900 chimpanzees currently available for research funded by the National Institutes of Health. They're housed in half a dozen research centers around the country.
The report also is likely to influence the use of chimps by the Pentagon, other federal agencies and private industry -- and perhaps to modify proposed legislation in Congress calling for bans on using great apes in research.
While the committee did not call for an outright ban on experimental use of chimps, its report emphasized the decreasing need for the animals. Advances in genetics and cell culture allow the use of less-advanced animals.
Chimpanzees' genetic closeness to humans -- we're at least 97 percent similar -- and their physical and behavioral characteristics make them a uniquely valuable species for study, and also demand greater justification for their use in research, the committee said.
"The committee concluded that research use of animals that are so closely related to humans should not proceed unless it offers insights not possible with other animal models and unless it is of sufficient scientific or health value to offset the moral costs,'' said Jeffrey Kahn, chairman of the panel and a senior faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics in Baltimore. "We found few cases that satisfy that criteria."
The report also stressed that behavioral or cognitive studies using chimps should be done only when there is no alternative and that anesthesia and brain imaging be limited, perhaps only when done along with regular veterinary care.
Animal rights activists have long criticized experiments on chimps and other primates in decades past -- involving restraints, sensory deprivation or open-skull brain tests -- as excessive and abusive.
The panel noted that NIH has sponsored only 110 research projects involving chimps in the past decade, with nearly half involving study of hepatitis -- particularly hepatitis C, which infects more than 3.2 million Americans and is a leading cause of liver disease and failure. Only humans and chimps are known to be susceptible to the virus, and chimps have been widely used in seeking drugs and vaccines to treat or prevent infections.
Even so, the committee noted that, in the long run, chimps should only be needed to test preventive hepatitis C vaccines because there are other means to test treatments, including experiments with infected humans once safety has been established.
Hepatitis research is a major focus at the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, which has become a flashpoint in debate over chimp research since officials proposed an expansion and upgrade of the facility two years ago.
NIH, along with several members of Congress, asked for the research report last year after animal rights groups objected to plans to move 200 chimps from an NIH facility in Alamogordo, N.M., to the San Antonio facility, rather than retiring the animals to a sanctuary. The chimps were descended from a 1950s colony of "space chimps" established at Holloman Air Force Base for research by NASA and the Air Force on the effects of high-altitude flight.
About 300 other chimps from another Alamogordo facility were transferred to a sanctuary group, Save the Chimps, in 2002 and now all are housed on a group of man-made islands outside Fort Pierce, Fla.
The 200-page report also urged tight guidelines for any behavioral or cognitive studies using chimps.
(Contact Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com.)
