experiments
Fiona Macleod South Africa is earmarked for experiments on animals that have already seen thousands of them dying agonising deaths. The experiments involve pumping human genes into days-old piglets and then transplanting their hearts into baboons and monkeys.
Top-secret documents by scientists researching the process, called xenotransplantation, show that thousands of animals have died during the research in the past five years. The research – aimed at eventually transplanting animal organs into humans – has made little progress. The documents caused a furore when they were leaked last week from inside the world’s largest xenotransplantation outfit, Imutran, based in Cambridge, Britain. Amid calls for the research to be closed down, Imutran got a court order preventing publication of the documents. Imutran plans to go into partnership with the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) medical faculty to expand its xenotransplantation research. In a two-phase project, 100 pig- to-baboon heart transplants and 100 kidney transplants are planned. The Medical Research Council’s animal centre at Delft in Cape Town will supply and house the baboons and transgenic pigs, which have been injected with human genes. “Baboons are the best-suited non-human primates to test pig organ xenotransplantation. Usage and availability of baboons is being increasingly restricted worldwide. South Africa still represents a unique opportunity,” the plan states. It also highlights UCT’s potential to provide cardiac and kidney transplant expertise. Dr Roland Auer, director of UCT’s animal unit says there is “high interest” in furthering xenotransplantation research which was due to start this year, but finances and resources are a stumbling block.
Imutran and its parent company, Swiss drugs giant Novartis, stand to make huge profits from the research. If xenotransplantation works in humans, it is forecast the industry will be worth between R60-billion and R100-billion by 2010. It will also provide Novartis with huge marketing opportunities for immuno- suppressant drugs, which restrict the body’s natural rejection of foreign objects.
Pilot studies on xenotransplantation and immuno-suppression have been carried out at UCT and at Wits University, but these have so far been limited to rodents and transplants between different kinds of primates.
“We are not geared yet to either house or breed transgenic pigs,” says Auer. “They require special conditions, like constantly filtering the air, and have to be housed under sterile conditions.” John Austin, head of the Delft centre, says an initial investment of about R2,5-million is needed to get the programme running. He plans to breed baboons rather than take them from the wild. Animal welfare groups in South Africa express concern about importing cruelty that even the strict laws in Britain have not been able to prevent. The basis of the United Kingdom’s Scientific Procedures Act is that animal experimentation is licensed only if the benefits to humanity outweigh the harm to animals. “In Britain you have to go to the top if you want to do experimentation. You have to apply at government level to do research and government inspectors can inspect the facilities at any time,” says Neil Fraser, an inspector at the National Council of SPCAs.
“But here we do not have any specific legislation on vivisection. We are basically reliant on the research outfits to introduce ethics committees and to do their own monitoring.”
One of the most horrifying images to emerge from Imutran’s catalogue of horrors is of a monkey holding a pig heart attached to the blood vessels in its neck. In the last days of the animal’s life, the transplant was “swollen red” and “seeping yellow fluid”. About a quarter of the animals died on the operating table or within a few days because of “technical failures” in surgical procedures.
One monkey had to be “sacrificed” when researchers discovered the pig kidney it was about to be given had been mistakenly frozen. Another died after a swab was left inside his wound during the operation. Imutran says the animals do not suffer, but the documents describe them as quiet, huddled, shivering, unsteady and in spasm after the operations. Some had swellings and bruising; others vomited, or suffered from diarrhoea. Over the past five years Imutran has performed more than 400 transplants on primates in Britain. Thousands of baboons, monkeys and pigs have been killed in the process.
Ever since the mid-Nineties the company has been declaring that it is within a year of extending the tests to humans. Yet the leaked documents show there is still a long way to go. Imutran was recently given an 18-month deadline by senior managers at Novartis to show “substantial” increases in survival rates.
British animal rights group Uncaged Campaigns compiled a report on the leaked documents, called Diaries of Despair, and called on the British government to halt xenotransplantation research. After the group started running the documents on the Internet and the Daily Express newspaper featured a front-page article on them late last week, Imutran obtained a court order preventing further publication.