Tag: Primates

Animal Rights Groups Offer Reward for Evidence of Abuse at Salk Institute

Last Chance for Animals and San Diego Animal Advocates garnered some press earlier this month in a transparent publicity attempt — the two groups offered a reward of up to $30,000 for evidence of animal cruelty at the Salk Institute.

In a press release announcing the offer, the San Diego Animal Advocates said,

In conjunction with the Los Angeles-based group Last Chance for Animals, SDAA is offering a reward of $20,000 for information leading to the conviction on animal cruelty charges of a principal investigator and the Salk Institute in San Diego, after our groups were tipped by an anonymous source that animals are being mistreated.

. . .

We will also offer a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to official sanctions and termination of grants and research projects at Salk for animal abuse. These rewards are necessary to expose the truth because employees are threatened with loss of their jobs.

Last Chance for Animals Chris De Rose said in a prepared statement,

Salk officials have refused to meet with us to discuss the information we received. So now we are going directly to the employees who are witnessing this cruelty and asking them to help us expose it.

Jane Cartmill of San Diego Animal Advocates hints at the real reason behind this little stunt, complaining in a prepared statement about a recent $7 million donation to the Salk Institute by Qualcomm President and CEO Irwin Jacobs. The money will be used to fund the Crick-Jacobs Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology. According to a Salk Institute press release,

The goal of the center will be to help Salk scientists organize the wealth of information that is now available about the genes and proteins that regulate nerve cell activity as well as the networks of nerve cells that regulate brain function. Named to honor Salk Nobel laureate Francis Crick, the center will build upon Crick’s important work during the past two decades centering on consciousness and cognitive processing within the brain.

. . .

The center will allow computational biologists to mine the enormous amount of data on the composition of genes and proteins in the brain as well as the neural networks that regulate information processing. The ultimate goal will be to generate theoretical models to explain how the brain works, which then will be tested in Salk laboratories by experimental neuroscientists. To advance this work, the institute is in the process of recruiting up to four new faculty members to staff the center.

Cartmill is horrified at that prospect, saying that, “Brain-mapping experiments are among the most devastating to animals and involve tremendous deprivation and suffering.”

But apparently not so horrified as to bother to discuss his allegations with the Salk Institute. A Salk Institute spokesman told NBCSandiego.Com that it had tried to contact the group about the allegations but received no reply,

The Salk Institute takes all allegations of animal abuse seriously. On Oct. 22, the Salk Institute requested the San Diego Animal Advocates provide in writing the specifics of their unsubstantiated allegations about animal abuse. To this date, the institute has not received a response to its request.

Imagine that.

Source:

Salk Institute Receives $7 Million Gift to Establish Neuroscience Center Press Release, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, December 17, 2003.

Groups offer $20,000 for evidence of Salk animal cruelty. Sign on San Diego, January 2, 2004.

Baboons Enlisted Again to Test Treatment of Premature Infants

Primate researchers in San Antonio are using infant baboons to test the efficacy of different methods of preventing the lungs of premature infants from collapsing.

The lungs of infant baboons provide a good model of infant human lungs, and as a story in the San Antonio Express-News noted, baboons were used to test replacements for lung surfactant

The San Antonio Express-News reports that researchers at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research are using baboons to test the efficacy of using ventilators vs. continuous positive airway pressure on premature infants. Airflow is needed to minimize the risk of lung collapse — a common problem with premature infants.

In the United States, ventilators are typically used on premature infants. Unfortunately, ventilators along with tracheal tubes can cause inflammation and other problems in the lung tissue of premature infants. Many premature infants on ventilators develop bronchopulmonary dysplasia, a chronic lung disease which requires infants to remain on ventilators for lengthy periods of time.

An alternative to ventilators is continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), which uses nostril clips or a mask to deliver air to the upper respiratory system. It is believed that CPAP causes less damage to the lungs than traditional ventilation, and the San Antonio researchers are studying baboon infants and premature infants to get a handle on whether this is true and, if so, how much less damage the CPAP technique does.

The only drawback to CPAP is it requires more attention from nurses and attendant training.

Source:

Baboons aid preemies. Cindy Tumiel, San Antonio Express-News, September 8, 2003.

NIH Renews Grant for Primate Cloning Project

In August the National Institutes of Health announced a five-year, $6.4 million grant to the Pittsburgh Development Center to continue its research into cloning monkeys and other primates.

In 1998 the NIH awarded funding to PDC developer Gerald Schatten to pursue issues surrounding the cloning of non-human primates. Schatten is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine.

According to Schatten, the ability to clone monkeys and other non-human primates would allow for the creation of new and more accurate models of human disease while also reducing the number of animals needed for such research. Actually cloning primates, however, has proven difficult.

Most animal cloning has involved variations on that used to clone Dolly the sheep — the nucleus of a fertilized cell is remove and replaced with one from an adult cell. That works relatively well in sheep, mice, rats and other species, but in primates the removal of the nucleus also has the unfortunate side effect of removing the mechanism responsible for separating chromosomes during cell division. The upshot is that when the cell divides, the resulting cells have the incorrect number of chromosomes.

Schatten told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that in efforts using this method of cloning on 700 fertilized eggs from rhesus macaques that they were not able to produce a single pregnancy.

Schatten and his colleagues will use this latest NIH grant to explore alternative methods, such as inserting the adult nucleus before removing the fertilized egg’s own nucleus.

Sources:

Pitt gets $6.4 million to clone monkeys. Anitra Srikameswaran, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 30, 2003.

NIH renews $6M grant to study monkey cloning. Pittsburgh Business Times, August 29, 2003.

RSPCA Unhappy about Plans to Obtain Primates from Mauritius

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals issued a press release in August saying it was “shocked and appalled” by a recent decision by the UK government to import research primates from a breeding center in Mauritius.

The RSPCA claims that the breeding center, Centre de Recherches Primatologiques, does not meet basic animal welfare standards and notes that in 2002 it provided the government with video footage and photographs of the center which the RSPCA says prove its claim.

RSPCA deputy head of research animals Penny Hawkins complained that the government does not make public its criteria for evaluating primate breeding centers,

We just do not know what standards the government applies and the RSPCA cannot therefore assess the scale of the problem.

In addition, the RSPCA claims that the Mauritius center and other international centers use primates caught in the wild which promotes the hunting of such animals. In the UK it is illegal to import a wild caught primate, but it is not illegal to import the captive-born offspring of a wild-born primate.

According to Hawkins,

The ultimate aim has to be to replace experiments on primates with humane alternatives. However until this is achieved, reducing the suffering associated with their breeding and supply must be an urgent and immediate priority for scientists, industry and the government.

Sources:

Fury Over Wild Monkey Hunts. Financial Times (London), August 31, 2003.

Primate centre decision shock. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, August 2003.

Researchers Keep Diabetic Monkeys Alive for 70 Days Using Pancreatic Cells from Pigs

A University of Minnesota researcher presented the results of his successful xenotransplant of islet cells from pigs into monkeys at the American Transplant Congress in June.

In research sponsored by Immerge BioTherapeutics, Dr. Bernhard Hering transplanted pancreatic tissue from pigs into monkeys who were not capable of producing their own insulin. Drugs were used to prevent the monkeys’ immune systems from rejecting the pig cells.

That is not news — cross-species transplanting of islet cells has been performed before. What was new was that as of June the monkeys in Dr. Hering’s experiment had kept producing insulin from the pig islet cells for more than 70 days,

We have been able to reverse diabetes in past islet studies, but we had only seen two or three-week survival times before the graft was lost due to the overwhelming rejection response. The survival times we are reporting on today should only increase as we further optimize the immunosuppressive regimes.

Which, of course, gets us one step closer to the possibility of one day transplanting non-human islet cells into human beings to treat diabetes.

Source:

Pig-to-monkey transplants may herald cure for diabetes. Steve Connor, The Independent (London), June 4, 2003.

Anthrax Vaccines Head to Clinical Trials

The American Forces Information Services reports that Phase I clinical trials of potential anthrax vaccines are underway to test the safety of vaccines first developed via animal research. These represent the first vaccines entering clinical testing under new FDA rules that allow efficacy data to come from animal research where human efficacy testing would be problematic.

Researchers first isolated a protein from the anthrax bacteria that they believed would evoke an immune response. They then developed a way to manufacture a recombinant version of this antigen in a non-disease causing strain of anthrax.

U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases scientist Arthur Friedlander said,

What we did was identify it [the antigen], purify it to a very high degree and show that this protein by itself was protective in the most relevant animal model of human inhalational anthrax.

That model was in non-human primates. In light of the 9/11 terrorist attack and the series of anthrax letters, the Food and Drug Administration adopted a rule in July 2002 that allows researchers to use animal data for efficacy purposes in instances where performing clinical trials is either impossible, because a disease is very rare, or where — in the case of anthrax — efficacy testing in human beings would require exposing people to a potentially lethal agent.

According to Friedlander, the work underway with the anthrax vaccines “is the first test case of the concept of licensing a vaccine based on animal efficacy data and trying to correlate that with the human immune response.”

University of Maryland researcher Lydia Falk, who is overseeing one of the clinical trials, told the American Forces Information Service,

[With the human clinical trials] We can begin to compare the responses we see in humans to what had been observed in animals. That’s a critical part of the development of these vaccines. The more preliminary investigative work that we can do, the more it benefits the entire field. Our hope is that the information we gain will be able to add to those building blocks that would lead to an accelerated development plan.

Presumably Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine will come out any day with a detailed explanation how all of the above vaccine investigational work could be completely replaced by computer models (but don’t hold your breath).

Source:

Anthrax vaccine moves into clinical trials. Karen Fleming-Michael, American Forces Information Service, July 9, 2003.