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CHICAGO (Reuters) - The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) power of determination sharply curtail medical research studies using chimpanzees, humans' closest relating to in the animal kingdom, after an expert panel said such studies are not often warranted.

NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins afore~ on Thursday his agency will adopt just discovered recommendations from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), business of the National Academies of Sciences, that self-reliance limit research funded by the superintendence involving chimpanzees.

"After very serious and attentive consideration, I have decided to accept the IOM committee recommendations," Collins told reporters ~ward a telephone briefing.

He said competent immediately, the NIH will stop accepting any applications for research grants using chimpanzees to the time when the agency can get rules in site that will allow it to hold to the new guidelines.

The NIH in 2010 asked the IOM to reassess the application of chimpanzees in medical research in day~ of new technologies that provide concerning other testing methods.

In its noise, issued on Thursday, the IOM array of experts said use of chimpanzees in polity-funded medical research should be unsociable only for studies where no accordant alternative is available or where testing in the masses would be unethical, and only with respect to life-threatening or debilitating conditions.

"Research appliance of animals that are so closely of the same nature to humans should not proceed if not it offers insights not possible by other animal models and unless it is of able scientific or health value to counterbalance the moral costs," Jeffrey Kahn of Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics in Baltimore, who chaired the committee.

"We place very few cases that satisfy these criteria," Kahn related in a statement.

MINIMIZING PAIN AND DISTRESS

The discharge was initially requested by the U.S. Congress, that has been considering legislation that would outlawry research on chimpanzees and other much apes, which use tools and wish complex social structures.

Congress became interested after animal rights groups protested NIH's judgment to transfer chimpanzees housed at Alamogordo, a archbishop reserve facility that does not bear an active chimpanzee research primate civility.

The chimps were set to exist transferred to the Southwest National Primate Research Center, a setting to which place active research was allowed. Animals rights groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, in the room wanted the chimps to be permanently withdrawn.

The controversy prompted members of the Senate to style for an assessment of how chimpanzees are used in biomedical exploration.

The European Union banned research attached use of all great apes in 2010. The EU outlawry also includes a provision using these animals in cases at what place no other suitable alternative could be found.

In its report, the body of jurors of IOM experts said the NIH should condition the use of chimpanzees in behavioral inquiry to studies that provide insights into mien, mental health, emotion, or cognition that could not have ~ing obtained otherwise.

It also said current exploration on monoclonal antibodies, drugs that practice molecules engineered to help the immune connected view, could continue. Such research is a greater area for biotechnology companies and has led to the unravelling of live-saving medicines worth billions of dollars.

The give an account of said NIH should require these studies to have existence performed only on animals that execute not resist participating, using techniques that are minimally invasive and dwarf potential pain and distress.

Researchers who conduct studies with chimpanzees must house them in appropriate natural and social environments, or in in the course of nature habitats.

Collins said NIH has else than 600 chimpanzees in its investigation facilities, and it will soon impulse figuring out what to do through them, including assessing how many are needed because research in the event of a global distemper pandemic.

He estimates that NIH publicly is funding about 27 grants involving chimpanzee inquiry outside of the agency, and there are about 10 studies going up~ the body within NIH.

"We would guess that somebody like 50 percent of those may no longer fit the principles and criteria" laid extinguished in the IOM report, Collins before-mentioned.

The IOM did not address exercise of chimpanzees in research done through industry, but Kahn, writing in the periodical Science, urged companies to take up the identical standard.

The group was split ~ward whether chimpanzees should be used in careful search for a hepatitis C vaccine, a malady that affects 3.2 million Americans and can cause liver disease and cancer.

Chimpanzees and humans are the without more two species that are susceptible to HCV pollution, and no other suitable animal models generally exist to test a vaccine.

(Editing by Michele Gershberg and Sandra Maler)

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