Experts call for strict limits on chimp research

Chimpanzees should hardly ever be used for medical research, a prestigious scientific group told the U.S. government Thursday ? advice that means days in the laboratory may be numbered for humans' closest relatives.

The Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies of Sciences, said studies in chimpanzees should only be allowed in cases where not studying them would hinder progress in treatments for life-threatening or debilitating conditions.

The panel stopped short of recommending the outright ban that animal rights activists had pushed. Instead, it urged strict limits that would make invasive experiments with chimps essentially a last resort, saying today's more advanced research tools mean the primates' use only rarely will be necessary enough to outweigh the moral costs.

Chimp research already was dwindling fast as scientists turned to less costly and ethically charged alternatives. The government agency in charge of it ? the National Institutes of Health ? called the new recommendations "scientifically well-founded" and signaled that it would make some changes.

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These apes' genetic similarity to people has long caused a quandary. It is what has made them so valuable to scientists for nearly a century. They were vital in creating a vaccine for hepatitis B, for example, and even were shot into space to make sure the trip would not kill the astronauts next in line.

But that close relationship also has had animal rights groups arguing that using chimps for biomedical research is unethical, even cruel.

"We understand and feel compelled by the moral cost of using chimpanzees in research," said bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn of Johns Hopkins University, who chaired the Institute of Medicine panel. "We have established criteria that will set the bar quite high for justification of the use of chimpanzees."

For biomedical research ? testing new drugs or giving the animal a disease ? that means using chimps only if studies cannot be done on other animals or people themselves, and if foregoing the chimp studies would hinder progress against life-threatening or other debilitating diseases.

The report was commissioned by the U.S. Congress, which has been considering legislation that would ban research on chimpanzees and other great apes, following the lead of the European Union, which issued a ban on research use of all great apes in 2010.

But that ban also includes a provision for research on the animals in cases where no other suitable alternative could be found.

The panel said NIH should require these studies to be performed only on animals that do not resist participating, using techniques that are minimally invasive and that minimize pain and distress.

Researchers who conduct studies with chimpanzees must house the animals in appropriate physical and social environments, or in natural habitats.

The report does not address use of chimpanzees in research done by industry, but Kahn, writing in the journal Science, urged companies to take up the same standard.

The panel said scientific advances in research tools makes the use of chimpanzees unnecessary in most cases. But it did say ongoing studies testing monoclonal antibody therapies, an engineered immune system hormone, and studies of a vaccine to prevent hepatitis C virus infections might be possible exceptions.

The group was split on whether chimpanzees should be used in research for a hepatitis C vaccine, a disease that affects 3.2 million Americans and can cause liver disease and cancer.

Chimpanzees and humans are the only two species that are susceptible to HCV infection, and no other suitable animal models currently exist to test a prophylactic vaccine.

The panel said it took into account the close genetic relationship between humans and chimpanzees, and the similarities in biology and behavioral characteristics -- traits that make chimps a great research subject, but also require greater scrutiny.

The U.S. is one of only two countries known to still conduct medical research with chimpanzees; the other is Gabon, in Africa. The European Union essentially banned such research last year.

Here, too, the practice is dwindling fast. The Institute of Medicine's investigation found over the past 10 years, the NIH has paid for just 110 projects of any type that involved chimps. There are not quite 1,000 chimps available for medical research in the country. While it's impossible to say how many have been used in privately funded pharmaceutical research, the industry is shifting to higher-tech and less costly research methods. One drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, adopted an official policy ending its use of great apes, including chimpanzees, in research.

Thursday's report was triggered by an uproar over the fate of 186 semi-retired research chimps that the NIH, to save money, last year planned to move from a New Mexico facility to an active research lab in Texas.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45684538/ns/health-health_care/

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