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Primate Research Slow but Not Stopped: Specially Bred Mice, Tissue Cultures Cut Use of Apes, Monkeys

Posted on: Monday, 13 March 2006, 12:00 CST

By Mike Lafferty, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

Mar. 13--The OSU Primate Research Center hasn't housed an ape or monkey in two years.

When the $2.53 million laboratory opened its doors in 1996, more than 380 monkeys and chimpanzees were being used in experiments on campus. The new center was to have held an additional 180.

Times have changed.

With the recent departure of nine chimpanzees for a primate refuge in Texas, no chimpanzees are left on campus. In all, 28 monkeys are left on the main campus.

The research center was supposed to be something special when it opened. The brainchild of William Yonushonis, who oversees laboratory animal use at OSU, the center is one of six buildings on about 100 acres off Godown Road, just east of Don Scott Field on the Northwest Side.

It was touted as a place where researchers from across the state could use primates in cancer and AIDS research.

"The advances we make with animal research helps protect human lives," Yonushonis said in 1996.

The opening, however, coincided with a decline in primate use, especially chimpanzees. Chimps were once thought to be the ideal test animals for AIDS studies. But scientists found out that, while chimpanzees can contract the human form of HIV, they don't develop AIDS.

Chimp use is down nationally, says the federal government, which has been scrambling to find retirement homes for its surplus primates.

Primate use fell as researchers switched to cell-tissue cultures, computer modeling and specially bred mice.

These days, the OSU primate lab is filled with rodents quarantined before they are sent to Main Campus labs.

They include standard lab mice, deer mice and hamsters, as well as high-toned transgenic mice that cost as much as $10,000 a pair.

"Everyone went into transgenic mice," Yonushonis said during a recent tour of the lab.

Of the more than 100,000 animals used in OSU lab research today, 90 percent are mice and rats. Rodent use has increased so fast that the university doesn't count each individual anymore. Instead, cages are counted, and that number is multiplied by 2.4 animals per cage.

Transgenic mice are useful because they can be bred for particular diseases, such as breast cancer. Other mice missing a portion of their immune system can be injected with human cancer cells that continue to live. Then the mice can be treated with experimental chemotherapies or gene therapies.

"We're actually looking at the effect of the therapies on human cancer. The mice are serving as the living test tubes for that," said Dr. Valerie Bergdall, Yonushonis' assistant and a veterinarian. "That application has been the one with the biggest impact on using mice instead of primates."

The few primates used in experiments at OSU are used in diabetes and brain research. The nine chimps that were recently sent to Texas were used in cognitive studies.

Neuroscientist John Buford studies and records the brain activity of monkeys when they reach for objects.

"That helps us understand the mechanism for recovery after a stroke," he said. "We try to understand the shared responsibility between these brain areas for normal reaching."

The monkeys, a species related to rhesus monkeys known as fascicularis, are killed and their brains dissected after the research so Buford knows he has recorded activity in the correct part of the brain.

"The difference of a millimeter can be the difference between studying the eye and the arm," he said.

The decline in primate numbers at Ohio State reflects a national trend among universities, said John Harding, director of primate resources for the National Institutes of Health.

At government research centers, the use of primates has increased. And chimpanzees are still important in medical research at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta and the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio.

Chimps are valuable in studying diseases for which there is no other available animal model, said Southwest Foundation scientist Robert Lanford.

And, he said, there is still a role for chimpanzees in AIDS research.

"If we really understood how chimps suppress HIV so well, it might help people," he said.

Nationally, 50,000 primates may be in use in government and university laboratories, not counting those operated by pharmaceutical companies.

Harding said 21 st-century diseases such as SARS and West Nile virus, are driving the demand. The primate of choice these days for AIDS research is the rhesus monkey, which can be infected with a simian version of HIV.

So more primates are likely to cross the threshold of Ohio State's Primate Research Center.

"Everyone wants investigators to do studies on tissue culture and computer studies. There's no question that will increase, but it's unlikely the use of nonhuman primates will decrease," Harding said.

"At the end of the day, you need a living, nonhuman primate, especially for vaccines, before it can go into humans."

mlafferty@dispatch.com

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Source: The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

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