Monkey studies will play a key part in the research, and project leaders hope the virtual absence of animal rights activism in China will help lure talent from overseas.
DENNIS NORMILE: After 5 years of planning and debate, China has finally launched its ambitious contribution to neuroscience, the China Brain Project (CBP). Budgeted at 5 billion yuan ($746 million) under the latest 5-year plan, the CBP will likely get additional money under future plans… The CBP focuses on three broad areas: the neural basis of cognitive functions, diagnosing and treating brain disorders, and brain-inspired computing. Monkey studies will play a key part in the research, and project leaders hope the virtual absence of animal rights activism in China will help lure talent from overseas…
One Chinese strength the CBP plans to expand on is imaging. A group led by Qingming Luo, president of Hainan University, has refined and automated a technique named fluorescence micro-optical sectioning tomography (fMOST) to slice and image microns-thick ribbons of tissue from blocks of mouse brains… Now, Luo’s team plans to do the same for the macaque brain, which is 200 times bigger, aiming to produce a “mesoscale connectome”—something like a wiring diagram…
China is already a leader in another CBP focus area, the development of disease models in monkeys. Poo’s team made headlines in 2019 by combining cloning with gene editing to produce five genetically identical macaques that lacked a key gene regulating the circadian clock. The cloning proved inefficient; the group used 325 gene-edited embryos and 65 surrogate females to create the five animals. But the gene deletion had dramatic effects: The animals exhibit sleep disorders, increased anxiety, and depression.
Poo’s group has also used gene editing to produce monkeys predisposed to Alzheimer’s disease. Other ION researchers are developing techniques for crippling genes in monkeys to induce symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, says Stanford University neuroscientist Aaron Gitler, who studies ALS and has spent the past year on sabbatical at ION.
Poo intends to share his team’s animal models. But because major airlines no longer carry nonhuman primates as cargo, researchers will have to visit the International Center for Primate Brain Research, which receives funding from the city of Shanghai and CAS and is not part of the CBP. The center is led by Poo and neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis, who over the past 2 years moved most of his team from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics after his lab was targeted by animal rights activists…
Logothetis, who declined an interview request, is unlikely to have similar problems in China. “There is some but not a lot of concern about animals used in research, but there is no animal rights group focusing on this area,” says Deborah Cao, an animal law and welfare expert at Griffith University, Nathan. Still, Chinese researchers are striving to “replace, reduce, and refine” animal experiments, says Ji Dai, a neuroscientist at CAS’s Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology. Even in China, policies on handling animals are getting stricter, he says.
For now, China is expanding the number of nonhuman primates in its research centers. The Kunming Institute of Zoology is completing a new facility that, with space for 5000 monkeys, will be China’s largest, says Bing Su, a geneticist there. CAS institutes in Shanghai already have more than 1000 animals and may double or triple that number, Poo says. He adds a monkey breeding and research center in Hainan province may hold 20,000 animals a decade from now. For comparison, the United States’s seven National Primate Research Centers hold 18,000 to 20,000 nonhuman primates. SOURCE…
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