A group of scientists from the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China’s southwestern Yunnan province has launched a genetic resource bank for the closest biological model to humans: the macaque. 

Known as the “Macaque Biobank,” the resource contains whole-genome data from 919 Chinese rhesus macaques, along with 52 phenotypic traits, or specific physical characteristics. The biobank launch and genomic analysis were published as an article in scientific journal Nature Communications on Sept. 30.

The Macaque Biobank aims to increase the efficiency of using laboratory macaques by providing researchers with complete individual animal data. The country currently faces a macaque shortage owing to the rapid proliferation of drug research, which has sharply outpaced the breeding rate of laboratory macaques. 

Project researchers also hope to enhance the reproducibility of experiments and ease of research targeting specific genes by providing test subjects with fully mapped genetic backgrounds.

China’s 2015 national drug reform — which facilitated the number of new drugs allowed to enter the market by increasing new drug application processing times — led to the rapid expansion of biomedical research, driving a steep rise in the use of macaques for drug safety evaluations. Each clinical trial for a new drug typically requires testing on up to 60 macaques, with the annual demand for lab macaques in China growing from fewer than 10,000 in 2013 to roughly 40,000 in 2024, according to research reports and industry data.

Like humans, macaques have a long reproductive cycle, including a six-month gestation period typically producing one child. In addition, test subjects must be at least 3 years old before they can be used in studies, making macaques a “strategic scientific resource,” often compared to computer chips in importance, necessitating their thoughtful and critical use.

The scarcity of macaques has also driven dramatic price fluctuations. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a crab-eating macaque used in medical trials cost roughly 8,000 yuan ($1,120). But the pandemic forced the suspension of the international macaque trade, causing prices to soar more than 30-fold, reaching 230,000 yuan per animal. Prices have now fallen but still hover around 100,000 yuan, making them a costly resource for labs. 

The Macaque Biobank has also revealed that Chinese macaques possess high genetic diversity and show marked genetic differences from their Indian counterparts. More striking is that the research team found that many genes targeted in pharmaceutical research exhibit functional variation among individual macaques. 

“This suggests that we must genotype experimental monkeys before conducting drug evaluations,” said Zhang Baolin, one of the lead authors of the article on the Macaque Biobank.

The team identified 20 genes whose loss of function was strongly correlated with specific phenotypic traits, as well as 3,192 potentially harmful mutations. Among them, a mutation in the DISC1 gene — linked to brain development and psychiatric disorders in humans — was found to cause stereotyped behaviors and abnormal brain function in macaques. 

Researchers say this discovery offers a rare animal model for studying psychiatric diseases, and the institute hopes the Macaque Biobank will become an irreplaceable platform for disease modeling in China.

Yao Yonggang, dean of the Kunming branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, neatly summed up the difficulty of using macaques in human disease research prior to the launch of the Macaque Biobank: “We were conducting black-box experiments,” he said. 

Editor: Marianne Gunnarsson.

(Header image: VCG)