Lab monkeys are in hot demand. The price reaches 160,000 CNY!

Currently, there is a shortage of monkeys in the china pharmaceutical industry, and pharmaceutical R & D enterprises are purchasing lab monkeys on a large scale.

June 6, JOINN Laboratories announced that Yingmao Biology had become its wholly-owned subsidiary, and 20,000 lab monkeys would be gradually put under its name.

In 2021, Pharmaron successively acquired 50.01% of the controlling shares of Biomedical RESEARCH and 100% of the shares of   Zhongke Lingrui (Zhanjiang) Biotechnology under new Japan Science, and won more than 10000 lab monkeys; In 2020, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Wuxi apptec acquired Guangdong Chunsheng monkey farm and harvested more than 20000 machins.

It is reported that there are many CRO enterprises that "hoard monkeys" like this. The supply of lab monkeys exceeds the demand. As a result, the price of lab monkeys is rising.

Take the machin as an example. Previously, it was less than 7000 CNY, but now it has soared to 160000 CNY, and the price has risen by more than 20 times.

Lab monkey prices continue to soar.

In fact, according to the previous prospectus of JOINN Laboratories, the price of machin in 2014 was 6567 CNY, but since then, the price has continued to rise, and has increased rapidly in recent years:

In 2018, China National Institutes of Food and Drug Control purchased 600 machins for experimental use, with a budget of 8.4 million CNY. The average budget for each machin was 14,000 CNY.

In 2019, NIFDC purchased 400 machins for experiment, and the budget amount rose to 12 million CNY. In one year, the average budget amount of each machin rose to 30,000 CNY.

By March 2022, NIFDC has purchased 40 machins for experimental use, with a budget of 5.3 million CNY. The price soared to 132,500 CNY. Recently, the price of a machin has reached 160,000 CNY.

In the past 5-10 years, China's lab monkey market has been in a state of tight supply and demand for a long time, and the price has maintained an upward trend, especially the price of machin has risen rapidly in the last 5 years.

Why do prices keep soaring?

According to the data, compared with mice and rabbits, monkeys are the closest to human and the most ideal animals for experiments. Some immunotherapies can only be tested with monkeys that are closest to the immune system of the human body.

According to a professor from the Institute of Virology of the medical department of Wuhan University, monkeys are needed for diseases similar to those with strong infectivity and great harm, which is one of the reasons for the high demand for machins after the recent outbreak of COVID-19.

From the perspective of demand, the high prosperity of the pre-clinical CRO industry, the accelerated pace of new drug research and development and epidemic factors have increased the use of non-human primate laboratory animals at home and abroad.

From the perspective of supply, the breeding cycle of lab monkeys is long. It takes nearly 4 years for lab monkeys such as machins to be able to be released for experiments. At the same time, due to the limitations of technology, epidemic situation and historical reasons, the breeding population and breeding rate of domestic experimental machins continued to decline. In the past five years, the number of commercial monkeys has showed a downward trend. The data shows that the domestic lab monkey stock is only about 30,000 at present. The voice of "Money can't buy monkeys" is getting louder in the market.