Genetically modified monkeys created to help scientists study autism

Using genetic engineering, Chinese scientists have created monkeys having a type of autism.

Chinese scientists say they have genetically engineered autistic monkeys in the hope of finding new ways to treat the illness.

Autism is an umbrella term for conditions characterized by impaired social interaction and restricted and repetitive behavior.

They can also pass these traits on to their offspring and are likely to become an important animal model for studying this complex disease.

But the monkeys also had significant limitations as models for MECP2 duplication syndrome and for autism in general, said Dr. Huda Zoghbi, professor of neuroscience and molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine. This, researchers say, “echoes the problems human children with the gene defect” have.

Qiu told The New York Times that one important next step will be imaging the monkeys’ brains, “trying to identify the deficiency in the brain circuits that is responsible for the autism-like behavior”.

The team tracked the behaviors of these mutant or “transgenic” monkeys as they grew up. Once fertilized, the resulting embryos were transferred to surrogate monkeys, yielding eight live births.

The Guardian reports that a group of 200 monkeys has already been established in a lab in China.

The researchers from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Science said that they discovered behavior similar to that found in humans, such as pacing around in circles and not interacting as much with other primates. Scientists, however, noted that a particular gene called MECP2 may play a crucial part in triggering the disease. Whether extrapolation from monkeys to humans – it’s still a pretty large leap – will provide any useful data remains to be seen.

The team started by using a non-lethal virus to transport copies of a human gene – MECP2 – into the eggs of crab-eating macaques (Macaca fascicularis).

If Qiu and his colleagues do manage to identify altered brain circuits in the monkeys, they plan to use gene editing or gene therapy to see if they can improve any behavioural symptoms.

According to the MIT Technology Review, neuroscientist Zilong Qiu reported that the monkeys created shared such symptoms as repetitive circling, avoiding interaction with others of its kind and making aggravated vocalizations in response to eye contact with humans.

A lot of the children diagnosed with the duplication syndrome display symptoms in line with the formal criteria for autism, but they also tend to have atypical behaviors, like seizures, major developmental setbacks and the inability to walk without aid. “We think a nonhuman primate is absolutely required in the long run for the development of drugs for human psychiatric diseases”. “This could be one possible animal model with relevance to at least a subset of individuals with autism”.

What’s more, monkeys don’t come cheap.

The monkeys in the newly published research did not exhibit every aspect of autism or every aspect of the genetic autismlike disorder.

“It’s so expensive here, so I think it’s very tough to do this”, said Rudolf Jaenisch, a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, in Cambridge, Mass. Jaenisch is a pioneer in the field of transgenic science, in which researchers alter the genetic makeup of animals.