Centre for Macaques (CFM) Core Funding

The Centre for Macaques breeds and supplies rhesus macaques to UK university laboratories, while also setting the national standard for primate welfare. This matters because the UK’s academic research into human health—particularly neuroscience, infectious disease, and vaccine development—depends on a small number of non-human primates. Without a reliable, ethically managed domestic supply, researchers would face severe shortages, forcing them to import animals from abroad under less controlled conditions or abandon lines of inquiry entirely. The Centre fills a critical infrastructure gap: it secures the chain of supply so that fundamental biological research can continue without interruption. If the Centre succeeds in its core mission, the immediate impact is invisible to the public but essential to the research system. UK labs will have consistent access to purpose-bred macaques raised to high welfare standards, reducing reliance on overseas sources. The Centre also conducts its own welfare and scientific research, and distributes tissue samples for ex vivo studies—work that can refine how primates are used and reduce the number needed in future experiments. This is primarily an infrastructure and logistics project, not a discovery-driven one, but without it, much of the UK’s primate-based biomedical research would grind to a halt.