110 chimps to be removed from ULL center

The National Institutes of Health says it will relocate 110 of its chimpanzees from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's New Iberia Research Center and to stop using the animals for biomedical testing.

The Advocate reports that the plan was announced Friday.

The move comes as NIH decides how best to implement recommendations that call for more stringent standards on biomedical research using chimpanzees, considered the closest relative to humans in the animal kingdom.

NIH in December suspended funding for all new research involving chimpanzees pending the development of new guidelines for research that are expected to limit the use of chimpanzees to studies in which other testing alternatives have been exhausted.