Why Big Pharma Can’t Quit the Lab Monkey Business

Can Big Pharma produce the medicines and treatments America needs without the long-tailed macaque?

It’s not a rhetorical question. The go-to lab monkey for the $586 billion biopharmaceutical industry and many areas of research is at the center of the complicated international trade drama that industry groups say threatens to clog the nation’s vital drug development pipeline.

Twice in recent years, the research community has experienced sudden, serious shocks to its monkey supply: In 2020, at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, China stopped exporting its captive-bred long-tailed macaques, cutting off the US drug industry’s main source. American importers pivoted quickly to monkey breeders in Cambodia, which supplied the U.S. with 60% of those brought into the country between 2020-2022.