Ending Monkey Experiments Will Help Human Medicine

The company, Alpha Genesis, offers various services, including the breeding of monkeys to sell for experiments, conducting experiments on monkeys in-house, and supplying laboratories with monkey “products” like blood and tissue.

The monkeys – young, female rhesus macaques – escaped in Yemassee, SC while being kept for “conditioning” – getting used to captive living, cages, and handling by technicians. Amid international sympathy and calls for the monkeys to be afforded sanctuary, all but four were recaptured and returned to the laboratory, where they are destined to be used in experiments.

This is far from the first time Alpha Genesis has been questioned regarding contraventions of guidelines and laws meant to protect animals. The district’s Congresswoman has demanded an inquiry and briefing from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), citing multiple historical investigations and federal citations, including escapes, mistreatment, substandard oversight and housing, poor veterinary care, and preventable injuries and deaths. More recently still, the USDA confirmed it is investigating whistleblower reports of the death of 18 monkeys from a heater malfunction. Their deaths are alleged to be due to negligence.

Even ignoring such violations, the escapees’ fate, like that of the tens of thousands of other monkeys in laboratories around the world makes uncomfortable reading. Monkeys in laboratories experience pain, suffering, and chronic stress and distress. They may be housed alone for lengthy periods, subjected to restraint, suffer deliberate nerve/brain damage, be exposed to potentially harmful substances, and more. They may be captured from the wild, transported in crates, and forcibly bred, even before becoming experimental subjects. All are acknowledged to cause pain and stress, often significant or severe - particularly in fields such as regulatory toxicology, or neuroscience.

Not surprisingly, polls show that a growing majority of people object to this. This opposition persists even if claims of human benefit are accepted - but the reality is very different. A formidable, broad, unprecedented body of evidence shows that using monkeys (and other animals) to discover more about human diseases, and the safety of new therapies for them, is not predictive for humans. It has hampered our understanding of countless human diseases, and resulted in drugs being approved that have caused considerable harm to people and/or simply don’t work. Potentially safe and effective drugs are likely lost due to misleading animal tests indicating harmful effects.

Decades of research in fields such as HIV/AIDS vaccines, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, stroke, rheumatoid arthritis, respiratory diseases, and more, have produced little human benefit due to a reliance on irrelevant monkey “models”. Fewer than one drug in every ten that appears to be safe and effective in animal tests makes it through human trials and to market, with the biggest reasons for failure being toxicity and/or poor efficacy in human trials, not predicted by animals. New therapies for human cancers have one of the highest failure rates, at 95%. The contribution of monkey experiments to the likelihood of a new drug’s safety in people is negligible.

We also know why such failure is manifest. Different species are too biologically different from all others to serve as a model for any other. For instance, chocolate, grapes, and macadamia nuts are poisonous to our dogs. Even though humans and monkeys share many genes – around 90-95% - we know that those genes are expressed differently. They often do different jobs in different ways, and this matters. It is the core to how different we are as species, and in terms of our susceptibility to diseases and how pharmaceutical therapies might, or might not, work for us.

Animal research therefore harms humans too. We must, as we did in the US for research using chimpanzees, move away from research using monkeys, and ultimately all animals. Encouragingly, change for the better is real, though frustratingly slow. Some researchers have built their careers using monkeys and are not incentivized to adopt other approaches. Research institutions receive hefty grants for projects involving monkeys, and have a vested interest in maintaining the revenue stream. Regulatory agencies often expect to see animal data, even if strong evidence from nonanimal tests is provided. The US even has seven primate research centers that support continued primate research. Rather than seeking to avoid primate research, efforts are being made to increase it. The NIH has proposed millions of dollars to support primate breeding programs and infrastructure, so that monkeys can be more readily available.

However, efforts to encourage and support change are gaining traction. Worldwide trends show a decline in animal experiments with a significant rise in human-focused methods, both clinical and centered on advanced human cell and tissue cultures, so-called New Approach Methodologies (NAMs). This is driven partly by a greater appreciation of animal ethical considerations, but also by human ethical concerns. The only way to deliver more translational biomedical research is with a human focus. Clinical research, augmented by cutting edge – and often patient derived – cellular models of tissues and mini-organs, frequently combined with circulatory systems and other attributes to achieve significant physiological relevance, provide the platform. Complemented by advanced computational, artificial intelligence, and imaging techniques, this provides comprehensive and unprecedented human-specific models and data, which incorporate human diversity – to a level that cannot be achieved using different species.

One example of the superior nature of such methods is the use of “liver chips” – diverse human 3D mini-livers grown on small plastic chips – to predict drugs that might, or might not, cause liver damage. These chips had success rates far in excess of animal tests, which, if used more widely in place of animals, could save $24 billion annually to US pharmaceutical R&D. Such examples are encouraging funders, regulators, industry, academia, and legislators in the US to get on board, and to drive change that will benefit everybody. This is evidenced by the launch of several government initiatives in the past year, such as the NIH’s Complement-ARIE and the ARPA-H’s CATALYST programs. Likewise, the FDA’s Science Board recently released recommendations to drive integration of nonanimal technologies for regulatory decision-making, and the NIH director accepted working group recommendations to catalyze the development and use of NAMs.

Expanding collaborative and science-driven initiatives like these will hasten the day when monkeys escaping from their suffering in labs will become a thing of the past. But millions of people will benefit too, as human medicine takes a new turn towards true translational medical research and the timelier delivery of safer and more effective therapies.