Tokyo

Biologists in China plan to capitalize on the region's easy access to primates to set up a global resource for disease research.

The centre, based at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, southern China, will use locally obtained primates to build up a library of stem cells. It will also develop large colonies of transgenic primates for use as models of human disease.

Together, Sun Yat-sen University and local government have invested about US$1 million in the project, which is tentatively named the Center for Stem Cell Biology and Tissue Engineering.

The centre is being established in close cooperation with Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, Illinois. It aims to explore areas in which the use of primates has so far been limited, such as neurological disease and developmental biology. In the United States and Europe, primate research in these areas is restricted because of the high cost and lengthy life cycle of the animals, as well as criticism from animal-rights activists.

Cost should not be a problem for the new centre, says its director Peng Xiang, a former postdoctoral student of Lahn's. US researchers often pay US$5,000 per animal, but the centre will pay about one-tenth of that, Xiang says, obtaining several hundred rhesus macaques and crab-eating monkeys from a primate breeding centre nearby.

Xiang is also looking at obtaining inbred animals from an island south of China, although this may prove to be controversial as the removal of monkeys from the wild has upset conservationists (see Nature 417, 684–687; 2002).

Lahn believes that the centre could redefine primate research. “China's unique advantages in the field could propel it into a position of international leadership,” he says.

If so, it would bring many experiments, currently done in mice, one step closer to humans. “Primate research has tremendous promise for bridging the gap between what's known about the biology of mice and what we want to know about human disease,” says Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who has pioneered transgenic and cloning studies in primates.

Xiang argues that many experiments using mouse models have been inconclusive because of the great dissimilarity between humans and mice.

Already, 15 researchers are working at the new centre. According to Lahn, researchers will start with 100–200 monkeys this autumn and build to three times that number over the next few years. The founders of the centre say that they will adhere to Western-level research ethics, although doubts have sometimes been expressed about China's ability to police such ethics (see 'Are China's bioethics under control?').

The centre is expected to build on some of Schatten's pioneering work in primates, including efforts to clone a rhesus monkey (C. Simerly et al. Science 300, 297; 2003), and a gene-transfer experiment that achieved low-level expression of a jellyfish gene for a green fluorescent protein in another rhesus monkey (A. W. S. Chan, K. Y. Chong, C. Martinovich, C. Simerly and G. Schatten Science 291, 309–312; 2001).

According to Xiang, the centre will try to improve on previous transgenic experiments by using several different viruses to introduce the genes. The viruses will either be allowed to invade a newly fertilized egg on their own or will be injected directly into an egg, as the researchers look for the best way to create primates with active transgenes. The resulting animals could be used as models for neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's, Xiang says. The centre will also study the function of developmental genes such as hedgehog, focusing in particular on their role in brain development.

Another of the centre's aims is to establish itself as a global source of primate stem cells of various types and stages of development. The supply of primate stem cells will “be valuable in a few years, when clinical trials of stem-cell therapies are closer to reality and real preclinical work is necessary”, says Daniel Salomon of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

But Salomon doubts whether the centre's plan to create a pool of inbred monkeys will provide a useful model for disease research. “Inbred mice have been extraordinarily useful for basic studies,” he says, “but the translation to human patients that are everything but inbred has been problematic.”

The new centre's managers are already wary of ethical charges that may be levelled against their work. They have backed away, for example, from an earlier plan to grow tissue from human cells in primates for implantation back into humans. Such 'xenotransplantation' is seen by many experts as dangerous because of the risks of interspecies infection.