These details are harder to get in human trials because people are naturally exposed to COVID-19 and aren’t being monitored every day. Researchers can then follow the animals’ exact progression of disease or lack thereof, tracking how quickly antibody levels shoot up or whether a vaccine reduces how long the monkey sheds the virus. Monkeys can be challenged-that is, deliberately infected with COVID-19 after being given an experimental vaccine.
Scientists who work with primates, however, say that the animal research still offers certain advantages.
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She’s now exploring how to go straight into human-safety trials. Linda Marbán, the CEO of the biotech company Capricor Therapeutics, says her company originally tried to test its vaccine candidates at the California primate center. And with monkeys so hard to come by, others are wondering if certain studies can be skipped altogether. The similarity means that monkeys are also a good model for testing the agents that help boost the effectiveness of a vaccine, says JoAnne Flynn, a vaccine researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.Īs COVID-19 vaccine development has moved forward at an unprecedented pace, though, some pharmaceutical companies have started human trials before monkey studies have concluded. “Literally the same test,” says Skip Bohm, the associate director of the Tulane National Primate Research Center. They are closely related to humans, after all-so closely related that scientists refer to the research animals as, technically, “nonhuman primates.” For example, monkey and human immune systems are so similar that vaccine studies can use the same tests to measure antibodies in both. biomedical research, but they typically represent the last step before human clinical trials. Monkeys account for just 0.5 percent of the animals used in U.S. Meanwhile, non-COVID-19 research is also getting pushed aside. With so much demand for monkeys, the NIH is now centrally deciding which studies can use the national primate centers under a public-private initiative called Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV), creating a new bureaucratic bottleneck. “I have to tell them, ‘I’m sorry, we are not allowed to start your research,’” he says. The result, Van Rompay says, is that he gets emails and calls weekly from companies looking to test COVID-19 treatments at the California research center, one of the seven NIH-funded primate centers that work with both academic and industry researchers. A 2018 National Institutes of Health report had found that NIH-funded national primate centers would be unable to meet future demand and specifically discussed a “strategic monkey reserve” to provide “surge capability for unpredictable disease outbreaks.” A disease outbreak is upon us the strategic monkey reserve was never created.įurthermore, monkeys infected with COVID-19 have to be kept in Animal Biosafety Level 3 labs, which have specific design and ventilation requirements to prevent the spread of pathogens. And third, these pandemic-related events are exacerbating preexisting monkey shortfalls.
last year and which shut off exports after COVID-19 hit. Second, this coincided with a massive drop in supply from China, which provided 60 percent of the nearly 35,000 monkeys imported to the U.S. First, COVID-19 has created extraordinary demand for monkeys. The reasons for the shortage are threefold. Scientists in academia and industry alike are all competing for a limited pool of monkeys. They’ve completely disappeared,” says Mark Lewis, the CEO of Bioqual, a contract research organization that specializes in animal testing. The pandemic has made acquiring monkeys even harder. is expensive and often controversial, making it challenging even in normal circumstances. “Nationally, there is basically a big shortage,” says Koen Van Rompay, an infectious-disease scientist at the California National Primate Research Center. There just aren’t enough monkeys to go around. And here, scientists in the United States say they are facing a bottleneck. But for any of these treatments to make it to humans, they usually have to face another animal first: a monkey. In the past seven months, more than 100 COVID-19 vaccines, therapies, and drugs have been pushed into development.
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