The prices of laboratory monkeys in China are likely to rise to the highest level since the beginning of the covid pandemic in 2020. The increase in the price is due to the growing demand from the Chinese biotechnology sector, reports the Financial Times server.
The increasing price of monkeys shows the high volume of clinical trials in China. According to forecasts, one laboratory monkey should cost 150 thousand Chinese yuan (roughly 440 thousand crowns) at the beginning of this year. Last year, the average value of a monkey was up to a third lower.
“In 2025, many more projects have been launched due to strong investment. At the same time, the supply of monkeys is limited, which has led to an increase in prices,” said Chen Chen, a pharmaceutical industry analyst at UBS.
Chinese biotech companies signed a record number of licensing deals with foreign drugmakers last year, including AstraZeneca and Pfizer. At the same time, there have been a number of successful initial public offerings of biotech companies, which has encouraged venture capital investment in start-ups.
Due to the lack of monkeys, some clinical research organizations had to postpone their projects for several months. According to one industry executive, the shortage is because more research teams have entered mid- or late-stage development, when larger numbers of monkeys are typically used for testing.
Monkey reuse
The demand for monkeys is so strong that labs are increasingly reusing the same monkeys for clinical trials. This is a permitted practice for certain tests, but the monkeys must undergo a rest period before being used again. Biotech investors, however, place greater value on data from monkeys that have not yet been used in tests.
Monkey prices have fluctuated since the beginning of the pandemic, rising to a record 188,000 Chinese yuan in 2022 (over 650,000 crowns at the time). However, as investment receded, prices fell again. According to the analyst, breeders did not increase the population of primates during the decline, which contributed to their scarcity today. In China, it takes about four years for monkeys to grow to the stage where they are suitable for clinical trials.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently relaxed requirements to reuse monkeys for certain safety studies in an effort to reduce drug development costs. He thus followed the steps of Great Britain, which wants to invest in the development of technologies based on artificial intelligence with the aim of reducing the dependence on animal testing in the development of medicines.
However, according to analyst Chen, the implementation of these changes may take some time. “There is currently no complete replacement for traditional monkey testing methods,” she said. She added that the use of artificial intelligence is still in its early stages and will take some time to become more widespread in clinical trial testing.
