Paris

The only research facility in Europe conducting experiments on chimpanzees is to end all research using the apes.

The decision to stop the experiments at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre (BPRC) in Rijswijk, the Netherlands, comes after years of dissatisfaction over funding, and criticism from animal-rights groups over the the chimps' living conditions.

A report commissioned for the Dutch science ministry, made public on 27 April, said that research on chimpanzees housed at the centre should be phased out and the animals rehoused.

Anton Berns, head of research at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and chairman of the committee that produced the report, says: “Researchers at the BPRC are also victims of the poor facilities. They have been unable to improve the situation because of the lack of funding.”

The centre, which houses around 1,300 non-human primates including 108 chimpanzees, is currently funded by the Dutch science ministry to the tune of 5.2 million guilders (US$2.1 million) per year — about a quarter of its running costs. The rest comes from the European Commission and from private research contracts. Much of the centre's research is on vaccines for AIDS and hepatitis C, although malaria and other parasitic diseases are also investigated.

Some researchers have attacked the decision. One British scientist, who declined to be identified, said: “For years, we were positively encouraged by the European Commission to use the BPRC as a core research facility. We will be losing a valuable resource.”

BPRC's director Ronald Bontrop says the unit will accept the committee's recommendation to end chimp research, provided that the income needed to assure its future as a “quality research centre”, working with other primates, can be guaranteed.

The committee accepts that work with chimps on hepatitis C is justified as they are the only other species to carry the virus — but it suggests that the work be done with larger chimp colonies in the United States. It recommends that hepatitis work at Rijswijk be phased out over two or three years, but that AIDS work ceases immediately.

The future of the chimps is uncertain. The committee says that those infected with viruses should be given special housing, and healthy animals should go to sanctuaries or zoos, using funding from the Dutch government and the European Commission.

The chimps are down: macaques will take centre-stage at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre. Credit: H. VAN WESTBROEK/BPRC

Research on the other primates at the centre, notably rhesus macaque monkeys, will continue. But the committee says that more of the work should be conducted in peer-reviewed academic projects rather than under private contracts. It also recommends that the centre, which is currently managed independently, should establish strong links with a university. Leiden or Rotterdam universities are the most likely candidates, says Bontrop.

Hundreds of chimps have been bred in captivity around the world in the past 20 years to provide models for health research, mainly into AIDS vaccines. But it is now generally accepted that rhesus macaques provide a better model for HIV.

This leaves primate centres trying to cope with unneeded chimps, which are expensive to maintain and the culling of which would be unacceptable to the public. And some AIDS researchers still believe that chimps provide a uniquely useful animal model. Understanding why chimps stay healthy when infected with SIV, the simian equivalent of HIV, while humans die of AIDS is “a question of enormous importance”, says Mark Feinberg, an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “It needs to be answered whether the research is performed in the Netherlands or not,” he says.