“I think this is the natural next step of what has been a very thoughtful five-year process of trying to come to terms with the benefits and risks of trying to perform research with these very special animals”, Collins said in a recent interview with Nature.
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Collins said that the NIH had received only one request for chimpanzee research since reducing its population in 2013, and that request was later rescinded. In it, he wrote that several factors, including the fact that no researchers have asked to use chimps, led him to conclude that the 50 chimpanzees are no longer needed. In a memo leaked this week, agency head Francis Collins says that a colony of 50 chimps it had planned to keep in reserve for research-after retiring the rest-is no longer needed. The NIH agreed, and began phasing out remaining use of the animals in invasive medical research.
However, other non-human primates will continue to be used for research.
Chimp Haven is located in Keithville, Louisiane and has over 200 acres of forest for chimps to roam free.
The decision leaves about 400 other chimpanzees available for research at private facilities. “We still have work to do”, he says.
“Chimpanzee research had basically stopped”, Dr Pippin said. The Pitt researchers, along with other researchers from USA universities, will examine the genomes of 1,300 people, including 430 children affected with clefts and their parents.
“It will take our collective action and resources to push this issue over the finish line but it is the least these chimpanzees deserve after all they have been through”, Ms Conlee wrote in a blog about NIH’s announcement.
Peter Walsh, a disease ecologist at the University of Cambridge, added that the NIH move “narrows the possibilities for [chimpanzee] conservation research”. His group now wants to do further trials before deploying the vaccine in Africa. In 2011, a prestigious scientific group told the United States government that chimpanzees should hardly ever be used for medical research.
Collins says that a 2013 law passed by Congress requires NIH to move chimps to federal sanctuaries, of which Chimp Haven is the only accredited facility. Their constant pressure helped to persuade the Fish and Wildlife Service to list both captive and wild chimps as an endangered species.
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As for Ebola vaccine candidates, Collins noted that they’re already tested in monkeys, something that won’t change. “It’s not totally clear to me that one would need to do that same kind of testing in a group of captive chimpanzees before offering this in the wild”.
