Future vaccines depend on test subjects in short supply: Monkeys
Mark Lewis was desperate to find monkeys. Millions of human lives, all over the world, were at stake. Lewis, the chief executive of Bioqual, was responsible for providing lab monkeys to pharmaceutical companies like Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, which needed the animals to develop their Covid-19 vaccines. But as the coronavirus swept across the US last year, there were few of the specially bred monkeys to be found anywhere in the world.
Unable to furnish scientists with monkeys, which can cost more than $10,000 each, about a dozen companies were left scrambling for research animals at the height of the pandemic. “We lost work because we couldn’t supply the animals in the time frame,” Lewis said.
The world needs monkeys, whose DNA closely resembles that of humans, to develop Covid-19 vaccines. But a global shortage, resulting from the unexpected demand caused by the pandemic, has been exacerbated by a recent ban on the sale of wildlife from China, the leading supplier of the lab animals. The latest shortage has revived talk about creating a strategic monkey reserve in the US, an emergency stockpile similar to those maintained by the government for oil and grain.
Racing to find new sources
As new variants of the coronavirus threaten to make the current batch of vaccines obsolete, scientists are racing to find new sources of monkeys, and the US is reassessing its reliance on China, a rival with its own biotech ambitions. The pandemic has underscored how much China controls the supply of lifesaving goods, including masks and drugs, that the US needs in a crisis.
American scientists have searched private and government-funded facilities in Southeast Asia as well as Mauritius, for stocks of their preferred test subjects, rhesus macaques and cynomolgus macaques, also known as long-tailed macaques. But no country can make up for what China previously supplied. Before the pandemic, China provided over 60 per cent of the 33,818 primates, mostly cynomolgus macaques, imported into the US in 2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The US has as many 25,000 lab monkeys — predominantly pink-faced rhesus macaques — at its seven primate centers. About 600 to 800 of those animals have been subject to coronavirus research since the pandemic began. Scientists say monkeys are the ideal specimens for researching coronavirus vaccines. The primates share more than 90 per cent of our DNA, and their similar biology means they can be tested with nasal swabs and have their lungs scanned.
Skip Bohm, associate director and chief veterinary medical officer at the Tulane National Primate Research Center, said the discussion for a strategic monkey reserve started about 10 years ago among the directors of the national primate research centers. But a stockpile was never created because of the amount of money and time needed to build a breeding programme.