Nonhuman Primates In Research On Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies

Nonhuman primates played an important role in early studies of the human transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs): kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), and similar degenerative diseases of the nervous system. The high cost of procuring and maintaining nonhuman primates and growing public resistance have discouraged their use for TSE research in recent years. Invasive research with chimpanzees has effectively ended in the USA. A few situations remain, however, in which laboratory primates offer advantages for biomedical research on TSEs: (1) transmission attempts when etiology and host range of a human disease are not yet known or when more accessible tests to detect an infectious agent are either unavailable or not feasible; (2) studies of pathogenesis using monkeys instead of rodents may be more directly relevant to a human TSE; and (3) preparation of certain biological reference materials, such as blood or tissues infected with a human-derived TSE agent, might require a species of animal genetically close to humans because of antigenically similar prion proteins.