The Physicians Committee Urges Congress to Deny A $30 Million Expansion of Nonhuman Primate Infrastructure at NIH

The Senate’s Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (LHHS) appropriations bill for fiscal year (FY) 2025, which provides the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) annual funding, would allocate $30 million for the agency to upgrade and expand primate research infrastructure. Providing this funding would lead to increased breeding and use of primates in research, only furthering our country’s dependence on unreliable and unethical research approaches.

As part of the Physicians Committee’s efforts to encourage a shift toward nonanimal human-specific research methods in federal funding provisions, the Physicians Committee recently led a letter to the U.S. House and Senate Appropriations Committees asking that Congress reject this proposed funding for primate research centers as the funding bills for FY 2025 are finalized in coming months. Twenty-seven additional scientific, veterinary, and animal protection organizations and primate sanctuaries signed on to this letter to Congress, demonstrating broad support for the removal of this funding.

As the letter states, using primates in research is fraught with a variety of scientific, ethical, and economic concerns. Scientifically, primate experiments do not reliably translate to human benefit due to widespread species differences that cannot be overcome by genetic modification or “improved” techniques. For instance, vaccine development is one of the NIH’s largest uses of primates. Decades of HIV vaccine trials and millions of research dollars have still not brought about an effective HIV vaccine for humans, despite many candidates showing promising results in primates. For safety and efficacy testing of new drugs, primates are one of the most commonly used species, in addition to mice, rats, and dogs. However, new drugs fail in human trials more than 90% of the time, after passing animal experiments. Another priority area for primate research is Alzheimer’s disease, but the failure rate for Alzheimer’s therapies is even more egregious at over 99%. Continuing to depend on primates in experiments misleads researchers and prevents accelerated medical progress for patients.

Ethically, primates are cognitively and emotionally advanced, and suffer greatly simply from being in laboratories, but also from the experimental protocols which often cause considerable pain and distress. Many primate experiments involve prolonged restraint and isolation, brain surgery or implant installation, exposure to toxic substances, or repeated tissue biopsies. As a result, animals can develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and self-harming behaviors. These factors were reasons the NIH ended the use of chimpanzees for research in 2015—because they were deemed no longer necessary and there were significant ethical problems.

Economically, upgrading and expanding primate facilities and breeding programs would be expensive and lengthy, requiring sustained investment beyond just this one-time funding. The costs of acquiring and maintaining primates for use in research are significant, requiring long-term care, elaborate caging, and construction of housing. It would be irresponsible to dedicate taxpayer dollars toward this enormous build up of primate infrastructure, especially given the countless scientific and ethical problems with primate use. This funding could be better allocated toward more productive research programs supporting the development and use of human-based, nonanimal methods that are more capable of translating to progress for humans and avoid animal use.

It is clear that the public supports a shift away from animal experiments. A recent poll found that 85% of US adults agree that animal experiments should be phased out in favor of more modern research methods. Increasingly, government agencies, industry scientists, and academia are recognizing the many benefits nonanimal approaches provide—by relying on human cells, tissues, and data, nonanimal methods lead to more informative research findings for humans with better translation and shorter study lengths. The NIH itself acknowledged nonanimal methods as holding “tremendous promise for helping us better understand fundamental biology to advance human health,” while simultaneously providing potential to reduce or replace the use of animals and to “enable research to be done more quickly, by more researchers, and at a more affordable cost.” Further, the global market for nonanimal test methods is expected to continue to rapidly grow over the next decade, meaning more job and industry opportunities and technological advancements.

Taxpayer funding allocations should support modern science and innovation and reflect public desires. The Physicians Committee continues to urge Congress to reject the $30 million allocation for primate research infrastructure in the FY 2025 Senate LHHS appropriations bill, which would enable greater investment in other promising initiatives that can better drive research progress while moving away from animal experiments.

To support this effort by contacting your members of Congress, please visit: pcrm.org/monkeyfunding