Scientists in China say they used genetic engineering to create monkeys with a version of autism, an achievement that could make it easier to test treatments but that raises thorny practical and ethical questions over how useful such animal models will be.
Neuroscientist Zilong Qiu of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences says his team has generated more than a dozen monkeys with a genetic error that in human children causes a rare syndrome whose symptoms include mental retardation and autistic features, such as repetitive speech and restricted interests.
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The altered monkeys displayed shared psychiatric symptoms, including pacing in circles and interacting less with other monkeys. They became stressed more easily when researchers stared them in the eyes. The abnormal monkeys would grunt, coo, and scream more often if challenged in this way, according to Qius team, and two became severely sick in ways that echoed the problems human children with the gene defect.
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The monkeys show very similar behavior [to] human autism patients, Qiu said during a conference call organized by Nature, the journal that published the report today. We think it provides a very unique model.
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Qiu says thats the reason his institute chose to create autistic monkeys. He says scientists would now be able to study what brain networks had been disrupted, as well as try out treatments, such as deep-brain stimulation. Qiu says his group would also attempt to reverse the symptoms it created by erasing the genetic error in live animals. That could be done using new genome-editing technologies, such as CRISPR, he says.
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John Spiro, deputy scientific director of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative in New York, says he believes scientific leaders remain divided over how helpful primate models of autism will be. There is a sentiment that you are never going to generate enough animals to be able to do the really important experiments, he says. But a lot of people feel extraordinary strongly that rodents arent good enough. I would say the smartest minds in the field say we have got to do this.
