Scientists intentionally damaged the brains of live monkeys so they would mimic symptoms of Parkinson's disease for a research project funded by a U.K.-based charity.
The charity, Cure Parkinson's Trust, helped fund the research to find ways to reduce the side effects of drug treatments for Parkinson's, the Mirror reported. The tests, conducted in Canada, resulted in the monkeys having symptoms that resembled Parkinson's disease, including uncontrollable movements and psychosis.
"It is clear that the vast majority of the British public do not want their money being used to fund profoundly disturbing experiments on animals of the sort co-funded by the Cure Parkinson's Trust," Andrew Taylor, director of Animal Aid, an animal rights group, said according to the Mirror.
"We are calling on charities like the Cure Parkinson's Trust to focus solely on productive non-animal research, which- unlike their terrible experiments on monkeys- can be directly applied to humans," Taylor said
The scientists gave the monkeys a toxic chemical called MPTP that damaged their brains. The monkeys were then given high levels of the Parkinson's drug L-Dopa, which caused the animals to develop dyskinesia, otherwise known as uncontrollable movements.
Ecstasy was administered to the monkeys as a form of treatment. Some of the monkeys were even used for more than one experiment, the Mirror reported.
"The animals used in the current study were not drug-naïve and had been used in previous studies assessing the anti-dyskinetic potential of adjunct therapies," read a paper on the study published in 2011, the Mirror reported.
According to the U.K. government's Home Office, pain felt during animal testing is categorized as either "mild," "moderate" or "severe." The testing carried out on behalf of the charity falls under the "severe" category, Taylor told the newspaper.
"We've got the most severe category of suffering in which animals are being re-used paid for by the British public via a charity," Taylor said.
The charity released a statement saying it conducted the research with multiple philanthropic organizations and that it "actually prefers to avoid the use of animals in its leading scientific research," the Mirror reported.
