Monkey business boom & bust cycle echoes the beginning of the end for chimp use in biomedical research
WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana––The June 3, 2026 bankruptcy declaration of laboratory monkey supplier Inotiv, Inc. and 18 affiliated debtors may signify that biomedical research use of monkeys has entered the same boom-and-bust death spiral that killed biomedical research use of chimpanzees between the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s/1990s and the retirement of most chimps from labs early in the present century.
Monkey imports and breeding, especially of macaques, surged in response to research demand after COVID 19 hit the U.S. in 2020-2021, but the importers and breeders now appear to have over-supplied a diminishing market in light of steeply decreased federal agency funding for animal-based research in general, monkey use in specific.
Overhead costs are not peanuts
Neither Inotiv nor Charles River Laboratories, the two major vendors of monkeys to laboratories, are actually on the verge of dropping out of the business.
On the contrary, both still have thousands of monkeys locked up in cages and multi-millions of dollars locked up in capital investment in facilities to keep the monkeys there and breeding, ready for sale to whoever wants to buy them.
But the pace of imports and breeding appears likely to significantly slow, while the cost of maintaining what appears to be an excessive monkey inventory is not peanuts.
Inotiv and affiliates declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, allowing the companies to shed debt, restructure, and remain in business, as opposed to a type of bankruptcy, Chapter 7 for instance, which would have liquidated the company assets, dissolving the business.
Gambling
“Through this process, Inotiv will reduce its debt by approximately $326 million,” Inotiv told investors in a media release. “The company will maintain normal operations without disruption,” Inotiv pledged, “and [will] continue to deliver critical research models [meaning monkeys] and services to its clients.
“Inotiv has received commitments for $25 million in new money debtor-in-possession financing, which follows $40 million in bridge financing provided in May 2026,” the media release said. “These funds will be used to support the business throughout the Chapter 11 process.”
In other words, Inotiv has already found investors willing to spend $65 million sending good money after bad. How closely their investment resembles a casino gambler trying to recoup losses by gambling more remains to be seen.
Coulston cornered a market that vanished
In the long run, however, it may be worth remembering that toxicologist Frederick Coulston (1914-2003) thought he had profitably cornered a fast-growing market for chimpanzees in 1993, between those his Coulston Foundation owned outright and the 650 chimps the foundation looked after for the federal government at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Only five years later the Coulston Foundation, struggling to pay $2.5 million a year in care and feeding costs, returned title to 288 chimps to the National Institutes of Health.
Five years after that, in September 2002, Coulston sold 266 chimps to Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care founder Carole Noon and agreed to transfer the 300 NIH chimps remaining at his facilities to Chimp Haven.
The only money left in the laboratory chimpanzee business, for all practical purposes, was for chimp retirement.
Now on the downhill slope
Reported Science online news editor David Grimm on June 10, 2026, “There may be no immediate disruption in the pipeline of research animals, according to Naomi Charalambakis, director of communications and science policy at the biomedical research advocacy group Americans for Medical Progress.”
But the recent history of Inotiv points toward a boom-and-bust business cycle now on the downhill slope.
“Inotiv was founded in 1975,” wrote Grimm. “The contract research organization began to aggressively expand operations in 2018; over the next four years, the company acquired more than a dozen animal suppliers, drug testing facilities, and other research operations. It currently houses thousands of monkeys and tens of thousands of rodents, rabbits, and other research animals, which it supplies to labs in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.
“Numerous animal welfare scandals”
“Numerous animal welfare scandals have engulfed Inotiv over the past few years,” Grimm continued, as ANIMALS 24-7 has often reported.
“In 2021, it acquired Envigo, a leading supplier of dogs for biomedical research,” Grimm wrote, “shortly after that company’s Virginia facility came under fire for massive animal welfare violations.
“Inotiv was eventually sentenced to pay $35 million in criminal fines and forced to close the facility.”
(See Lab beagle breeder Envigo cops $35 million plea. Shareholder suits ahead.)
“In 2022,” Grimm continued, “the company was linked to a Cambodian monkey smuggling ring.”
(See Lab animal supplier Inotiv allegedly sold smuggled monkeys.)
Blamed everyone but itself
“In its Chapter 11 court filings, first reported by Bloomberg,” Grimm said, “Inotiv tied its financial woes to ongoing litigation related to the Envigo case. It also blamed cost competition from other contract research organizations that conduct animal studies, as well as a “highly regulated environment” including animal welfare oversight by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and control of monkey imports by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“Threatened cuts to U.S. National Institutes of Health funding and a desire among U.S. agencies to move away from animal research—and monkey research in particular—had also disrupted its business, Inotiv said in its filing,” which seemed to cast blame everywhere except upon its own management.
(See Trump regime & labs at odds: where does monkey demand go from here? and “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” orders CDC deputy chief of staff.)
Feds still have 7,000 monkeys
About 200 fewer macaques are expected be used in 2026 in U.S. federal laboratories, since the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention quit using non-human primates toward the end of 2025.
Grimm on May 15, 2026 reported about “a plan by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) to retire” 162 rhesus and pigtail macaques, apparently the last the CDC had, to the Born Free USA Primate Sanctuary near Dilley, Texas.
That will leave about 7,000 more non-human primates, mostly rhesus and pig-tailed macaques, still in custody of other government agencies, chiefly the National Institutes of Health, Food & Drug Administration [FDA], and Defense Health Services.
This contrasts with government-funded use of 71,921 non-human primates in 2021––most, to be sure, not housed by government agencies.
FDA Modernization Act
Further cutbacks in monkey use, as well as in use of dogs, cats, and even in relatively non-regulated rats, mice, fish and birds, are expected both in the U.S. and worldwide.
Explained Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy president Wayne Pacelle in a June 7, 2026 blog posting, “The FDA Modernization Act 2.0,” passed in December 2022, “removed outdated requirements that favored animal testing in drug development. Additional reforms are advancing through Congress, while federal agencies are investing in cutting-edge technologies that can replace animal experimentation.
“And we are poised, any day now,” Pacelle predicted, “to see the final passage of the FDA Modernization Act 3.0, which will ensure that agency regulations no longer force pharmaceutical companies to conduct animal testing that the law does not require.”
European Union
Added Humane World for Animals president Kitty Block and Sara Amundson, president of the subsidiary Humane World Action Fund, in a jointly signed June 11, 2026 blog posting, “Earlier this month the European Union published a roadmap for accelerating the pace of efforts to phase out animal testing for chemical safety assessments.
“In the U.S.,” Block and Amundson continued, “On June 2, 2026 the EPA announced plans to update its list of cutting-edge new approach methods, ones that are in important respects superior to animal tests.
“Simultaneously,” Block and Amundson added, “the EPA has introduced a streamlined process to enable researchers, companies, and other parties to propose specific non-animal methods for use in pesticide and chemical assessments.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Humane World for Animals & White Coat Waste agree about something
The release of the House Appropriations Committee’s FY 2027 Interior-Environment Appropriations package,” Block and Amundson continued, “includes first of its kind language to prevent the use of dogs for pesticide and chemical testing,
“The EPA has also been directed—through language in the House Committee’s report—to expand its efforts to reduce and replace the use of vertebrate animals in the testing of chemical substances with scientifically justified non-animal methods. This is consistent with the agency’s previously stated deadline to end testing on mammals by 2035.”
The same language was praised by the White Coat Waste Project in a June 11, 2026 Facebook posting.
Progress in Canada
In Canada, lobbied by Animal Justice executive director Camille Labchuk, the Ontario legislature on May 21, 2026 passed Bill 75, the “Keeping Criminals Behind Bars Act,” with riders amending the Ontario Animals for Research Act to prohibit any use of either dogs or cats in invasive medical testing.
“The bill also shields ‘prescribed animals’ like primates, even though primate research has not been prohibited,” explained Jacqueline So for Law Times News.
Inotive, though it is active in Canada, with a corporate office in Monckton, New Brunswick, does not currently house monkeys in Canada.
Routing monkeys from Cambodia through Canada, however, was central to the 2022 monkey smuggling scandal.
Rival Charles River Laboratories, according to Environment & Climate Change Canada, has imported 6,769 long-tailed macaques into Canada from Cambodia, many of them apparently still in Canadian laboratories.
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Best graphics yet Beth! This one is a keeper and may all of our heroes for lab animals+ Wayne Hsung etc be given recognition and ultimate victory
Second only to the foul business of SLAVERY, that of animal breeding, including monkeys – our cousins – is surely one of the most evil entities of which our species has embarked.
Those of us advocates and now many in the more general public are beginning to see it for what it is – evil incarnate. I am proud to be a supporter of many AR groups including PETA, HSUS and PCRM who have rightly condemned these abhorrent companies and are showing the way to a more humane yet successful mode of scientific progress.
We cannot wait until finally the light is turned out on such inhumanity for profit.