Building Huntington's Monkeys

Efforts to develop treatments for Huntington's disease have been hampered by the lack of utility of rodent models, which do not satisfactorily replicate the physiological and behavioral changes seen in disease patients.¹ In a paper published in Nature, researchers at Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University describe the development of a transgenic rhesus monkey that at least initially presents with clinical features of the human disease.

Company representatives and academics contacted by SciBX agree the new model could pave the way for developing Huntington's disease (HD) therapies if it is possible to breed the monkeys and develop lines with consistent genotypes and phenotypes...