Pathogen-free Primates

Achieving a better defined and improved virus and microbacterial state of nonhuman primates in European research - JRA2

The specific objectives for this research activity are:

• To develop new and improve upon existing assays, including reference materials, that are most appropriate for the diagnosis of selected infectious agents and fulfil the needs of the European research community.
• To evaluate the tests in conjunction with appropriate reference materials at different diagnostic laboratories to determine the robustness and sensitivity of these assays.
• To apply these tests to support the selection/exclusion of individual animals used in research, and to support efforts to establish breeding groups of known carrier status at the European centres.
• To establish a network of European primate researchers for the exchange of information on the emergence and detection of new diseases or syndromes appearing amongst nonhuman primates. As a result evidence of new emerging diseases will be more quickly recognised alerting the diagnostic research laboratories to the need for new detection assays.

Knowledge of the carrier status of a research animal is of central importance in biomedical research for a number of reasons:

• The animals should be healthy and if they are not the accurate diagnosis of their infection is central to appropriate veterinary and/or husbandry action,
• the chance that an animal becomes ill during a study due to a virus infection needs to minimised,
• even natural, non-pathogenic viruses of nonhuman primates (NHP) can interfere with study results, e.g. because a) of their relatedness with the viruses studied, b) their pathogenic potential in immunocompromised hosts, and c) by their cytopathogenic properties in cell cultures,
• many infectious agents of NHP are potential zoonotic infections of man and so improved knowledge about an animals virus status increases work safety , this is true even for pathogens of as yet uncertain impact (e.g. SFV, SV40),
• some viral infections of nonhuman primates (e.g. SRV, STLV, measles in macaques) are directly debilitating to the individual and/or group partners, affecting the reproducibility of data and their statistical validity if group sizes or sample numbers change during a study.

This joint research activity will result in the availability and use in the EU of nonhuman primates of defined carrier status. This will result in:

• An improved detection of key infections in nonhuman primates across the EU,
• fewer nonhuman primates excluded from research projects due to confounding or potentially dangerous infections,
• efficient ‘best practice’ strategies to breed nonhuman primates of highest quality,
• a markedly improved health and welfare of European primates,
• a reduction in the number of nonhuman primates needed to support the same level of research, thus contributing to the 3R-concept
• a minimisation of the health risks to humans working with nonhuman primates and with samples collected from them.