Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the road was probably in sight for using them, at least in
publicly sponsored research. After years of lobbying by
animal protection groups, the Chimpanzee Health
Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection (CHIMP) Act
became law in the USA in 2000. The act provided about
$29 million in funding and made the NIH responsible for
a sanctuary system for the government's research chim-
panzees. In 2002, the NIH's NCRR awarded a 10-year
competitive contract to a private sanctuary in Shreveport,
Louisiana, called Chimp Haven, Inc., to support the
retirement of up to 200 federally owned chimpanzees on
a cost-sharing basis. The Act initially contained a provision
that would permit retired chimpanzees to be returned to
laboratories for research in a national emergency. However,
Congress later removed this provision which essentially
precluded the further use of retired chimpanzees for any
kind of research except selected observational studies
performed at Chimp Haven.
A number of research chimpanzees, probably more than
800, remained in several other institutions around the
country, including several that the NIH continued to be
responsible for supporting. Others belonged to private
parties such as pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms and
academic institutions. Because there was very little need
for chimpanzees and the cost of maintaining them was very
high, the NIH in 2007 made permanent the suspension of
support for chimpanzee breeding it had imposed in 1995,
including in Chimp Haven (
Cohen, 2007
). John Vande-
Berg, director of Southwest NPRC and a leading nonhuman
primate geneticist, predicted that this would, in the absence
of further breeding, result in no chimpanzees being avail-
able for breeding or research in the USA by the year 2037
(J. L. VandeBerg, personal communication, 2007). The
Great Ape Protection Act (GAPA, House of Representa-
tives Bill
earlier was applied on a much broader and more productive
scale. With respect to microbiology, both the research and
human occupational safety imperatives for using macaques
free of B virus, SRV, STLV, SIV, and tuberculosis were
widely appreciated, and the technology for creating and
maintaining colonies of animals free of these viruses well
worked out and proven (
Buchl and Keeling, 1997; Morton
et al., 2008
). However, probably no center or research user
of nonhuman primates enjoyed the luxury of meeting all its
internal needs for animals with “closed” in-house breeding
programs. Thus, considering that imports came from
countries where the prevalence of a number of undesirable
microbiological agents was often high, zoonotic diseases
such as tuberculosis continued to be encountered.
Furthermore, imported animals and tissues that necessarily
were exchanged with other centers for research purposes,
or even in-house AIDS research using the SIV model,
always posed the threat of introducing B virus, SRV, STLV,
or SIV to nearby susceptible animals. Surprisingly, in
contrast to Henry Foster's early and lasting success in
deriving B virus free rhesus monkeys on his island breeding
colony, keeping later SPF colonies free from this agent
proved particularly challenging. While a lot of care and
money were required, breeding SPF macaques moved
ahead because they were needed, particularly for AIDS
research. Responding to this need with funding provided
from the NIH Office of AIDS Research, NCRR funded 12
cooperative agreements for restarting its SPF breeding
program in 2000 and 2002. These awards went to each of
the NPRCs, with the exception of the Wisconsin NPRC and
the Caribbean PRC in Puerto Rico (J. D. Harding, personal
communication, 2010). Beyond the promise of solving the
AIDS problem, the establishment of these breeding
resources represented a needed investment in the future.
1326
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z?c111:H.R.1326
) was introduced into the US House of
Representatives in 2009 to prohibit all invasive research on
chimpanzees, including blood draws, and to permanently
retire all chimpanzees belonging to the NIH. Some in the
research community protested that chimpanzees were still
needed for such work as development of a vaccine for
hepatitis C. However, resignation was probably the most
common reaction to the realization that the end was prob-
ably in sight, not only for using chimpanzees in research
but even being able to get them from anywhere.
>
Advances in Genetics and Genomics
It was also AIDS research that helped put genetic consid-
erations on the map with respect to nonhuman primate
breeding and research. It was not until after 1988 when
NCRR's AIDS Animal Models Program started providing
support for breeding SPF macaques (L. A. Whitehair,
personal communication, 1990) that the importance of
applying genetic monitoring data on kinship and inbreeding
coefficients, average heterozygosity, and effective pop-
ulation size began to be widely appreciated in managing
nonhuman primate breeding programs (
Buchl and Keeling,
1997
).
Accompanying the substantial advances in genetic
technology that occurred with mapping the human genome
was the generation of new genetic information about
nonhuman primate species as well, notably the chimpanzee
and the two species most used in biomedical research, the
rhesus and long-tailed macaque. It was found that the
Demand for Specific Pathogen Free and
Genetically Defined Nonhuman Primates
Specific Pathogen Free (SPF) NHPs
The need for SPF and genetically defined animals was not
a new development in the years following 2000, but these
were the implementation years where knowledge gained
