Experiments with monkeys are “morally required” as the only way to answer scientific questions of crucial importance to human health, an expert inquiry said yesterday.

The development of vaccines against the world’s three most lethal infectious conditions — HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis, which together kill seven million people each year — will rely on work involving nonhuman primates for the foreseeable future, the panel chaired by Sir David Wetherall found.

Primate research is also essential if scientists are to understand brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, the report concluded.

It insisted, however, that the need for every proposed monkey study should also be examined, case by case, to ensure that there was no alternative and the potential medical gains outweighed the likely suffering involved.

It also found no scientific case for lifting the ban on experiments involving great apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas.

“The members of this working group share the view that continued use of nonhuman primates in research is therefore morally required, so long as such research is directed towards significant human benefit and there are no plausibly more effective ways of pursuing such research,” the report said.

“The alternative is to permit continued suffering to very large numbers of humans which might be alleviated or indeed removed by a careful, well-monitored and meticulously regulated programme of animal research, including research with non-human primates.” Sir David, who is Regius Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Oxford, was commissioned to examine the issue by Britain’s four most respected medical science groups: the Medical Research Council, the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Wellcome Trust.

Just 0.16 per cent of animal experiments involve primates, and a total of 3,115 monkeys, mostly marmosets, were used in 2005. About three quarters of these were used by pharmaceutical companies for toxicology tests — an area beyond the Wetherall report. Just 247 procedures were conducted on monkeys for basic research.

While the report found that alternatives to primate research are available in many fields of medical research, some monkey experiments remain necessary.

Vaccine development is particularly reliant on monkey studies, to assess candidates before they proceed to expensive human trials.

Neuroscience requires primates because they are the only animals with brain circuitry remotely similar to that of humans. There is also a case for allowing primate research for investigating reproductive medicine.

“I don’t think anyone in their right mind would want to see an end to any form of animal research,” Sir David said.

“If you were to take it away tomorrow there would be certain areas in vaccinology and neuroscience that would suffer very greatly.

“It is estimated that there is funding available for only about ten major HIV, tuberculosis and malaria vaccine trials in the next ten years.

“These trials can take five years and involve 10,000 volunteers. Pre-testing in a small number of non-human primates can ensure we only proceed into human trials with vaccines that are likely to prevent millions of people dying of these diseases.”

Opponents of primate research argue that the animals’ complex brains make it unethical to inflict pain and suffering for any reason.

The panel also recommended that primate research should be concentrated in four national centres of excellence, rather than spread across thirteen different universities that often lack the space to provide state-of-the-art animal housing. However, a proposal to build such a centre in Cambridge foundered at the planning stage because of concern that it would become a flashpoint for animal rights extremism.

Planning reforms that are being introduced to make it easier to build wind farms and nuclear power stations might also be used to clear the way for such facilities, Sir David said.

Simon Festing, director of the Research Defence Society, which represents scientists involved with animal experiments, said: “Scientists will welcome this thorough and sensible report on primate research.” Vicky Robinson, chief executive of the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research, welcomed the call for case-by-case evaluation but added it was disappointing that the report did not go far enough in trying to map out the priorities for development and adoption of new alternatives.

“Nor did it identify what gaps in our current understanding need to be broached in order to move forward in the areas that are less promising at the moment,” she added.

Gill Langley, science director of the Dr Hadwen Trust, which supports non-animal medical research, said: “This report seriously underplays the importance of non-animal research methods. Subjecting such highly sentient and sensitive animals to laboratory confinement as well as to painful or distressing experiments is morally bankrupt.”

1986

The last year in which great apes such as chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans were used in scientific experiments in Britain

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