Tell Senate “NO Funding for Primate Breeding!”

Congress is currently working on the federal government’s 2024 fiscal budget and the Senate Appropriations Committee has included $30 million for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to renovate, expand, and build new infrastructure at its National Primate Research Centers. This support will expand primate breeding efforts and increase the use of primates in invasive research in the U.S., perpetuating a reliance on animal models that are unreliable and not applicable to human disease.

In its report, the committee wrongly states that animal models contribute to “understanding the biological processes that cause disease, which is necessary for the development, safety, and efficacy testing of new therapeutics.” However, over 90 percent of new drugs tested on animals, including primates, fail in human clinical trials, a widely acknowledged statistic in the regulatory and biomedical research communities. Instead, Congress should help reduce the reliance on animals in science by providing funding for the use and development of human-based models of disease that produce data that can be directly utilized to gain greater understanding of human biological systems and create new drug treatments. Primates have rich, emotional, and social lives, and they suffer greatly when confined and used in laboratory experiments.

Congress should not bow to pressure from animal research lobbying and interest groups by supporting primate research and ignoring the ethical, scientific, and economic concerns surrounding this flawed science. Please contact your Senators today and urge them to remove NIH funding from the federal budget that would increase primate research.