Swedish scientist Karin Lore used to depend on China to keep her laboratory running. A professor at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet, Lore studies the immune system’s interaction with vaccines, and safety tests on monkeys are a critical part of her research. But after Covid-19 hit, Beijing halted exports of primates central to her work amid concerns that live animals could contribute to the virus’s spread. More than two years later, monkeys from China are in increasingly short supply, leaving Lore and scientists around the world struggling to complete their research.
“I can see some studies will never be done,” Lore says. An executive at a Western pharmaceutical company, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified, backs her up, saying the shortage has already led to delayed production of some compounds and stalled decisions about drug development. The ban and rising medical research demands have had a “knock-on effect on global supply” that has raised the pressure on the few primate suppliers outside China, the UK government said in June.
Of all the bottlenecks sparked by the pandemic—computer chips, toilet paper, even bicycles—the shortage of primates used in medical research is among the most consequential. Drug researchers depend on the animals to help determine how new compounds will affect humans. So China’s export ban is reverberating globally, making the work of scientists trying to develop treatments for everything from the next coronavirus variant to Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis even harder—and possibly giving the Asian nation an edge in developing its own medicines.
