After eight generations of breeding, the colony of baboons at Texas BioMedical number near 1,000, housed in zoo-like cages on the 6-acre research campus.
SUSAN WARREN: ‘Covid-19 has infected at least 101,000 people and killed almost 3,500 since the world began keeping track in December, and academics, companies and governments are racing to arrest its rapid spread. Officials have said finding a therapy or vaccine could take months or years, and cost more than $1 billion. Animal experiments can discover how the virus functions and which treatments are most effective…
Finding the right animal as a research model for the new and deadly coronavirus is crucial for learning how to treat it. The ideal subject is a non-human primate that shows similar symptoms: coughing, sneezing, fever and chest congestion. The hunt is on in the U.S., tightly coordinated among a small coalition of labs authorized to raise monkeys for research. High hopes are riding on a troop of Texas baboons… To cure the humans, first you get the monkeys sick… the University of Wisconsin’s primate center is starting with marmosets. Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana is working with rhesus macaques..
Then there is the unique colony of baboons at Texas BioMedical. After eight generations of breeding, they number near 1,000, housed in zoo-like cages and a 6-acre indoor/outdoor habitat on the research campus. It’s outfitted with swings, tunnels, rock features and toys to keep the animals occupied. Baby baboons are raised by their mothers in separate harems. Twelve veterinarians and nine animal behavior experts tend to them…
As an independent nonprofit, Texas BioMedical is a rarity in U.S. research, which is dominated by university and government labs… Virologist Luis Giavedoni is leading the baboon project… It gets 80% of its annual $60 million budget from the federal National Institutes of Health… Texas BioMedical began breeding baboons on the western fringes of San Antonio in the 1950s. The center also has macaques and marmosets, whose frailty and shorter lives make them ideal for studying age-related disease such as arthritis.
But baboons, which can grow as big as 75 pounds and live into their early 20s, are vulnerable to the same kind of “lifestyle” diseases experienced by humans, such as arteriosclerosis, osteoporosis and diabetes… There’s no guarantee an effective animal model will be found. The coronavirus could mutate, keeping scientists in catch-up mode. Or it could weaken and fade away before a model is perfected’. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: