China ‘operating out of lab monkeys to check on’ as breeders cannot sustain with demand
The country’s breeding facilities cannot cope with demand for non-human primates from huge biotech companies, meaning global advancement in the industry has been stalled
China is running out of lab monkeys to test on (stock)(Image: NurPhoto via Getty Images)
China is running out of lab monkeys to test on due to huge demand from pharmaceutical companies – and it’s causing huge problems across the industry.
The country’s breeding facilities cannot cope with demand for non-human primates from the large biotech companies, according to reports. This means Beijing’s booming clinical pipeline has ground almost completely to a halt.
In July the price of one macaque on the Chinese market shot up to a whopping £21k, nearly double its price last year.
The price of the animal has risen by double in a year (stock)(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
This crisis is because every single new drug must go through rigorous animal trials before it touches a human volunteer, Chinese contract research firm Joinn Laboratories said earlier this month.
“In the medium to long-term, the home-developed drugs will account for more share in China’s pipeline of innovative drugs for overseas markets, further increasing the demand for macaques,” said Chinese analyst firm Orient Securities in a statement.
Despite the advancement of AI, many firms reported that the use of primates to test certain drugs is still the best way to test efficacy.
The quiet crisis is having global repercussions
Mice aren’t any good as an alternative either – for obvious reasons you learn far more about drugs set to be used on humans by testing them on primates than rodents.
And it’s not just in China where this vicious bottleneck is being felt. When Chinese contract research organisations face ‘monkey shortages’, timelines stretch out worldwide causing a bit of a meltdown.
Costs climb and smaller biotech companies often get priced out entirely, leaving only deep-pocketed conglomerates to be able to secure testing slots.
In January US pharmaceutical giant Charles River proposed to acquire K.F. (Cambodia), one of its monkey suppliers, for nearly £5million to secure the non-human primate supply chain.
And more recently WuXi AppTec – another Chinese biotech giant – acquired a Suzhou-based company for roughly 804 million yuan £89million with one of its acquired entities holding about 20,000 macaques.
