US to adopt strict new limits on chimp research

Days in the laboratory are numbered for chimpanzees, humans' closest relative. Chimps paved astronauts' way into space and were vital in creating some important medicines. But the U.S. government said Thursday that science has advanced enough that from now on, chimpanzees essentially should be a last resort in medical research — a move that puts the United States more in line with the rest of the world. 

Chimps' similarity with people "demands special consideration and respect," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. 

His move came after the prestigious Institute of Medicine declared that most use of chimpanzees for invasive medical research no longer can be justified — and that strict new limits should determine which experiments are important enough to outweigh the moral cost of involving this species that is so like us. 

"The bar is very high," said bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn of Johns Hopkins University, who led the institute panel. 

The group stopped short of recommending an outright ban, saying a handful of research projects today might still require chimps — but more importantly, that the animals might be required in the future as new diseases evolve and emerge. 

Animal welfare groups welcomed the change but continue to push for Congress to pass legislation that would go a step further and phase out all invasive chimp research. 

"Chimpanzees have provided limited value in research settings, and now alternative methods have been developed that will make their use all but obsolete," said Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States. 

But some scientists say it's not that big a change because chimp studies already were dwindling fast as researchers turned to less costly and ethically charged alternatives. 

"The use of a chimpanzee in biomedical research is the rare exception," said Dr. Thomas Rowell, who directs Louisiana's New Iberia Research Center, one of five research centers that houses chimps and other primate species used in both government- and privately financed studies. 

It is not clear exactly how many of the nation's 937 research chimps — 612 of them owned by the NIH — are in the midst of experiments that would be affected by the new standards and could be moved into retirement instead. Most of the chimps are fairly old, as the nation has had a moratorium on breeding since 1995. 

But Collins temporarily barred new government-funded studies involving chimps as his agency began implementing the recommended restrictions. Also, a working group will decide whether to phase out about 37 ongoing projects, about half of which Collins said probably don't meet the new standards. 

These apes' genetic closeness to humans — the genome is about 99 percent identical to ours — has long caused a quandary, making the animals valuable to medical researchers for nearly a century but also sparking ethical and emotional questions about how they are housed and used. 

"They are highly intelligent. They live in complex social settings, and they live for a very long time," said evolutionary anthropologist Anne Pusey of Duke University, who once worked with chimp expert Jane Goodall in Tanzania and manages an archive of Goodall's field data on the animals. 

"When you enclose a chimp in a very small cage for 50 years, it really is cruel and unusual, even regardless of whether you're doing invasive things to them," she added. 

The U.S. is one of only two countries known to still conduct medical research with chimpanzees; the other is Gabon, in Africa. The European Union essentially banned such research last year. 

Thursday's decision was triggered by an uproar last year over the fate of 186 semi-retired research chimps that the NIH, to save money, planned to move from a New Mexico facility to an active research lab in Texas. They are staying put for now. 

The Institute of Medicine's investigation found over the past 10 years, the NIH has paid for just 110 projects of any type that involved chimps. Most involved hepatitis C, a liver virus that infects only humans and chimps. Some involved HIV, a disease that scientists now know is better to study in rhesus monkeys. Still others involved comparing the genetics of chimps and humans, or behavioral research examining such things as development and mental health. 

The institute recommended two different sets of restrictions. Biomedical research — testing new drugs or giving chimps a disease — should allow using the apes only if studies could not be done on other animals or people themselves, and if foregoing the work would hinder progress against life-threatening or debilitating conditions. The panel said behavioral and genetic research, while less controversial, nonetheless should be limited to studies that provide insights otherwise unattainable, using techniques that minimize any pain or distress. 

The institute combed research files to see what types of projects would fit those strict criteria — and could come up with only a handful, such as a possible need to test vaccines against hepatitis C in the animals. But the panel concluded chimps aren't needed to study cancer or a host of other diseases or even to test most drugs. 

The standards would not automatically apply to privately funded pharmaceutical research, although the industry, too, is shifting away from use of chimps. One drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, adopted an official policy ending its use of great apes, including chimpanzees, in research. 

Author: Lauran Neergaard | Source: Associated Press [December 15, 2011]

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Xenotransplantation: using pigs as organ and tissue donors for humans

Transplantation is the best available treatment for many serious health problems including diabetes, kidney failure and heart disease. These conditions affect millions of people worldwide and the cost of treatment, loss of productivity and reduced quality of life are enormously expensive to society. 

Pigs may be the answer to Australia’s organ donor shortage [Credit: Thornypup]

Although transplantation offers a lifeline to these patients, there is far greater demand for organs and tissues than can ever be met using human donors. Even with the government-driven push to increase the donation rate in Australia, many patients will become too sick to receive a transplant or will die while on the waiting list. 

Some scientists believe that stem cells will ultimately provide a solution to this pressing medical problem, but growing a highly complex organ from stem cells remains in the realms of science fiction, at least for now. 

A treatment that is much closer to reality, and indeed has already entered early clinical trials, is the transplantation of animal organs, tissues or cells into humans. This is called xenotransplantation. 

Which species? 

Humans are primates, so the obvious choice of donor animal for xenotransplantation would appear to be another member of the primate family (chimpanzees and baboons, for instance) because of their physiological similarity. But non-human primates have been ruled out as donors for several compelling practical and ethical reasons. 

One of the risks to transplant recipients is infection by viruses transmitted by the transplanted organ. As our closest cousins in the animal kingdom, primates are more likely than other animals to carry viruses capable of infecting humans; HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, originated in chimpanzees. 

This “relatedness” also poses ethical problems, with the public understandably reluctant to exploit animals that share many features with humans. And even if you discount the ethical question, it’s hard to imagine being able to breed enough primates to meet the increasing demand for donor organs. 

Primates aren't the best fit to donate organs and tissues to humans [Credit: Troy B Thompson]

Pigs, on the other hand, tick many of the boxes. They can be raised in a clean environment, so the risk of infection from pig donors may actually be lower than that from human donors. They are already widely bred for the food industry, solving the supply issue and, provided they are treated humanely, present less of an ethical dilemma. 

Material from pigs has been routinely and safely used for medical purposes for decades, with heart valves the best known example. The evidence from animal models suggests that most pig organs will work properly in human recipients. 

On the downside, the evolutionary distance between pigs and humans means that the human immune system mounts a very strong response to pig organs. The drugs that are used to prevent rejection of human transplants are simply not powerful enough when it comes to pig transplants. 

One solution for this problem is to genetically modify pigs so that their organs will not be recognised as foreign when transplanted into humans. Several groups around the world, including in Australia, have produced GM pigs for xenotransplantation research. These pigs are still in the testing phase, but the progress that has been made over the last 10 years suggests that the move to the clinic is not too far away. 

Treating diabetes with pig islets 

Pigs may also be the key to future treatment of diabetes. Insulin, the hormone that controls the level of sugar in the blood, is made by clusters of cells in the pancreas called islets. People with type 1 diabetes have abnormally high blood sugar because their islets are destroyed by the immune system. While regular insulin injections restore some control, the long term prospects are poor, with complications including renal failure and blindness. 

Transplantation with human islets is an option open to only a handful of patients. Pig islets are an attractive alternative, because pig insulin is 98% identical to human insulin and was used to treat patients before recombinant human insulin became available. 

In a clinical trial currently taking place in New Zealand, pig islets contained within microcapsules have been injected into the abdomen of 11 patients with diabetes. The microcapsules allow nutrients to get in and insulin to get out, but importantly they also protect the pig islets from the recipient’s immune system so that no anti-rejection drugs are needed. Early results suggest that the microcapsule treatment will not be a complete cure, but may benefit patients with severe diabetes. 

In the meantime, many other strategies are being explored. Results from animal models showing islets from GM pigs can reverse diabetes for many months are particularly encouraging. 

Future xenotransplantation 

A recent review in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet is carefully optimistic that clinical xenotransplantation may soon become a reality, particularly for cellular grafts such as islets. Will this be, as suggested by the authors of the review, the “next medical revolution”? We’ll have to wait and see. 

Author: Peter Cowan | Source: The Conversation [December 14, 2011]

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What do animals 'know'? More than you may think

Rats use their knowledge to make decisions when faced with ambiguous situations, UCLA psychologists report.

A rat finds a reward in an ambiguous situation [Credit: Aaron Blaisdell/UCLA Psychology]

"Rats often make judgments and behave as if they're rational creatures," said UCLA associate professor of psychology Aaron Blaisdell, a member of UCLA's Brain Research Institute and senior author of a new study published in the December issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

"To make a decision in the face of uncertainty, rats call on prior history and reasoning," Blaisdell said. "They apply what they know to a situation where they are uncertain. The rats are not necessarily thinking like little humans, but they have learned through experience. A lot of animal behavior seems to be rational. Their behavior follows logical inferences."


Blaisdell, an expert in animal cognition (he avoids the phrase "animal intelligence"), and Cynthia Fast, the study's lead author and a UCLA graduate student in psychology, report on a series of experiments in which 74 female rats were rewarded with a sugar solution — which rats like about as much as teenagers like soda, Blaisdell said — for pressing a lever under certain conditions but not under others, which they learned to differentiate. 

The rats, none of which were harmed, first learned to expect the sugar reward if they pressed a lever when they saw one of two lights illuminated in their enclosure but not when they saw both lights on. After learning this pattern in 90 days, the rats were shown only one illuminated light while the other light was covered. In this case, the rats searched less for the sugar solution, as if both lights were on. This indicated, Blaisdell said, that the rats imagined the other light to be on, even though they could not see it. 

"Their behavior is consistent with their having an image of the light being on," Blaisdell said. "When we didn't cover the light, they knew what decision to make. They have the ability to hold an image of something that is not there and make a decision based on that." 

"Their prior learning influenced how they perceived this ambiguity," Fast said. "The rats responded less in this condition than they would if there was just a single light but more than they would if both lights were on. It would be like your driving on your commute and approaching an intersection where you know there is a traffic light but you can't see it because a tree branch or a bus in front of you is blocking your view. You approach slowly until you're able to see if the light is red or green. The rats seem to be doing the same thing. It's as if they reason, 'Hmm, I can't see the light on the right; maybe it's on,' and they press the lever less than they would if there were just a single light on."

The research was federally funded by the National Science Foundation.

In another experiment, rats were given the reward only if they pressed a lever when both lights were on, but not when either light was on alone — a pattern they learned much more quickly (in only 30 days). Then the psychologists covered one of the lights to study how the rats would respond. 

What was surprising, they said, was that covering the light in this case did not seem to have any impact on the rats' decision to respond. They continued to behave as if they were certain that the covered light was not on.

 To find out why, the researchers conducted a follow-up experiment in which the rats were again given the reward for pressing the lever when both lights were on (but not when only one was on), and they were also given the reward if they pressed the lever when they heard a tone or a clicking sound — but not the tone and clicking sound simultaneously. Other rats were given the reward only if the tone and clicking sound occurred together, not separately.

"The rats are capable of learning that too," Fast said. "They learn to differentiate among these different lights and different auditory cues and can tell them all apart." 

"It takes them a long time," Blaisdell said.

The rats were more sensitive to ambiguity when the uncertainty followed the more challenging training involving both the lights and the auditory cues, even in the condition that failed to make a difference previously, Fast and Blaisdell report.

"The difficulty of the task the rats are engaged in affects how they deal with uncertainty," Blaisdell said. "When the task is more difficult, they address it in a more sophisticated fashion. As far as I know, that has not been shown with any animal before."

 Little is known about how human imagination works, but an understanding of how widespread imagination is across the animal kingdom can shed light on the origins of imagination,
Blaisdell said. 

The aging brain 

The ability to make decisions in ambiguous situations declines with age, Blaisdell and Fast noted.

"With aging, decision-making becomes more fragile, especially in the face of lack of information," Blaisdell said. 

Blaisdell is interested in learning the brain mechanisms involved in decision-making and perhaps applying this research to human cognition and neural changes that occur with aging or with degenerative diseases. He also hopes to gain new insights into how we learn.

"There is still so much we don't know about learning," he said. "The more we can understand about how the brain supports cognition, the more we will be able to look for where cognition is going wrong when the brain malfunctions." 

Author: Stuart Wolpert | Source: University of California Los Angeles [December 08, 2011]

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Denying mental qualities to animals in order to eat them

New research by Dr Brock Bastian from UQ's School of Psychology highlights the psychological processes that people engage in to reduce their discomfort over eating meat. 

This paper will be published in an upcoming edition of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, where Dr Bastian and his co-authors show that people deny mental qualities to animals they eat. 

"Many people like eating meat, but most are reluctant to harm things that have minds. Our studies show that this motivates people to deny minds to animals," Dr Bastian said. 

The research demonstrates when people are confronted with the harm that their meat-eating brings to food animals they view those animals as possessing fewer mental capacities compared to when they are not reminded. 

The findings also reveal that this denial of mind to food animals is especially evident when people expect to eat meat in the near future. 

Dr Bastian said it shows that denying mind to animals that are used for food makes it less troublesome for people to eat them. 

"Meat is central to most people's diets and a focus of culinary enjoyment, yet most people also like animals and are disturbed by harm done to them; therefore creating a 'meat paradox' - people's concern for animal welfare conflicts with their culinary behavior. 

"For this reason, people rarely enjoy thinking about where meat comes from, the processes it goes through to get to their tables, or the living qualities of the animals from which it is extracted," he said. 

Dr Bastian's research argues that meat eaters go to great lengths to overcome these inconsistencies between their beliefs and behaviours. 

"In our current research we focus on the processes by which people facilitate their practice of eating meat. People often mentally separate meat from animals so they can eat pork or beef without thinking about pigs or cows. 

"Denying minds to animals reduces concern for their welfare, justifying the harm caused to them in the process of meat production," he added. 

Meat is pleasing to the palate for many, and although the vegetarian lifestyle is increasingly popular, most people continue to make meat a central component of their diet. 

"In short, our work highlights the fact that although most people do not mind eating meat, they do not like thinking of animals they eat as having possessed minds," Dr Bastian said.  

Source: University of Queensland [November 25, 2011]

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