Covid's Next Bottleneck: Monkeys

China's ban on exports of the key research animals could give its drugmakers an edge

- James E. Ellis and David Rocks

Swedish scientist Karin Lore used to depend on China to keep her laboratory running. A professor at Stockholm's Karolinska Institutet, Lore studies the immune system's interaction with vaccines, and safety tests on monkeys are critical to her research. But after Covid-19 hit, Beijing halted exports of the primates central to her work amid concerns that live animals could spread the virus. More than two years later, monkeys from China are in increasingly short supply, leaving Lore and scientists around the world struggling to complete their research.

"I can see some studies will never be done," Lore says. An executive at a Western pharmaceutical company, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified, backs her up, saying the shortage has already led to delays in the production of some compounds and stalled decisions about drug development.

Of all the bottlenecks the pandemic has sparked-computer chips, toilet paper, even bicycles-the shortage of primates used in medical research is among the most consequential. Drug researchers depend on the animals to help determine how new compounds will affect humans. So China's export ban is reverberating globally, making the difficult work of scientists trying to develop treatments for everything including the next coronavirus variant, Alzheimer's disease, and tuberculosis even harder and possibly giving the Asian nation an edge in developing its own medicines.

With the shortage has also come a spike in costs: The average price has more than doubled since just before the pandemic, Lore says, to about €11,500 ($11,000) per animal. One research industry executive says it's worse in some cases, rising to more than $35,000 per primate at times. For now, Lore says, her lab has postponed some of its projects, including work on vaccines for malaria and rabies. "Already, prices were so high," she says. "This is just making it even tougher."