Animal shortage 'slows science'

Scientists fear the shortage will hinder research

A worldwide shortage of laboratory apes and monkeys could be holding back research into new drug treatments and genetics, it has been claimed.

The problem, highlighted in the first global audit of primate studies, is said to threaten advances aimed at tackling HIV and neurological diseases.

Swedish experts scoured 3,000 research papers to determine the extent to which primates were used in research in 2001.

The findings are reported in this week's New Scientist magazine.

It's absolutely true there is a significant shortage of primates given the research needs Professor Colin Blakemore, MRC

The audit, by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden, identified 4,411 studies with experiments performed on more than 41,000 individual animals.

Up to 200,000 primates could be used in scientific research each year, the researchers estimated.

But the apparently high figure masked an acute shortage of monkeys and apes available to scientists.

Demand for such animals had risen, partly because of the need to use species closely related to humans in HIV and Aids research.

Some researchers think the shortfall "could be slowing ground-breaking advances into neurological disease, HIV, drug development and genetics".

Grant rejection

The shortage meant many research grant proposals were being turned down because scientists could not obtain enough animals for their experiments.

Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the UK's Medical Research Council (MRC), said: "It's absolutely true there is a significant shortage of primates given the research needs, which are still considerable."

He insisted conducting experiments on monkeys was the only option in a number of research areas despite "huge pressure not to use the animals".

The audit showed that Old World monkeys were the most widely used primates, being chosen for 65% of all experiments.

New World monkeys were used in just over 15% of studies, and apes such as chimpanzees in just under 9%.

The report highlighted the fact that research papers often failed to state the conditions primates were kept in, and their research history.

This made it difficult to gauge the scientific validity of experiments and harder for scientists to know they were accurately reproducing each others' work.

In the UK, no chimpanzees are used in lab experiments and primate procedures (which constitute less than 0.1% of all animal experiments) are performed predominantly on marmosets and macaques.