NIH says it will need more than a year to develop new policies
to allow chimpanzees in biomedical research “only under
stringent conditions,” as suggested by the Institute of Medicine
(IOM) and National Research Council of the National Academies.
An IOM 12-member ad hoc committee prepared a report called
Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research: Assessing the
Necessity, calling for changes to usage rules pertaining to
chimps. In that report, the institute positioned itself as all
but opposed to future chimp research. “While the chimpanzee has
been a valuable animal model in past research, most current use
of chimpanzees for biomedical research is unnecessary,” IOM
concluded in its report. “The present trajectory indicates a
decreasing scientific need for chimpanzee studies due to the
emergence of nonchimpanzee models and technologies.” According
to the IOM report, 110 NIH-sponsored projects between 2001 and
2010 involved chimpanzee research. Of those 110, 44 projects
were for research on hepatitis; c