Swallowing just a few drops of a new vaccine could protect against the deadly Ebola virus. The new immunization is not meant for humans, but chimpanzees and gorillas, for which Ebola is a devastating disease as well. Yet the vaccine may never reach these great apes.
[...] U.S. rules on research with chimpanzees are another hurdle, Walsh says. Further improvements on the vaccine, for instance to prevent it from losing its activity in the tropical heat, would require another round of testing on captive animals. And that looks all but impossible at the moment, he says.
Biomedical research on chimpanzees has been declining for years, and a new rule issued by the U.S. government in 2016 requires a permit under the Endangered Species Act. Although the rule still allows research on captive chimps if it benefits wild populations, the restrictions have made it too expensive to maintain chimpanzee groups for research, says Walsh, who cut his own vaccine study short when the rules took effect last September. Walsh has titled his paper "The Final (Oral Ebola) Vaccine Trial on Captive Chimpanzees?"
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/ebola-vaccine-great-apes-shows-promise-ethical-hurdles-may-block-further-research
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep43339
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @09:07PM (4 children)
Everything... For example, the treatment of the animals will be different so they will experience different levels of stress depending on whatever bias the researchers have. This isn't something that should require explanation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @09:28PM (3 children)
Did you even look at the paper? The researchers studied the effects of stress on the animals.
I also fail to see how the supposed researcher bias is going to convince the chimpanzees to specifically produce Ebola neutralizing antibodies. Please dumb-it-down for me since you think it is obvious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @10:13PM (2 children)
Researcher treats the animals different, resulting in different stress levels, which affects immune response. Except the first step, this is even one of their conclusions:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @11:23PM (1 child)
Stress does not generate Ebola-specific neutralizing antibodies. You need a BCR that re-arranges due to antigenic stimulation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @11:58PM
Sure, but it apparently is thought to affect the amount of antibody being produced (which was what was looked at here). From looking around, some also say stress is linked to vaccine failure (lack of producing the antibodies), so it possible you could see a total lack of antibody. Anyway, the ways a study can be messed up by bias are pretty much endless. Perhaps the researcher will rerun a negative elisa if they know a vaccination occurred but not otherwise which will generate a false positive, etc.
That is why scientists take the simple and cheap precaution of blinding themselves. There really is no excuse.