A viariety of animals have been used for tuberculosis research,and each animal model has its own strong and weak points.Nonhuman primates are quite susceptible to Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection by aerosol route and to develop a disease resembling to that in humans,including the pathology in the lungs,the progression of the disease,the characteristics of immunologic alterations,the antigen-induced T lymphocyte reactivity both in vitro and in vivo,and get to be protected by BCG vaccination.Therefore,nonhuman primates seem to have significant advantages over conventional laboratory animals in the research on the relation to infection and immunology,and the process of immunologic system devastation.Also such model is valuable in evaluation of effectiveness of vaccines.But there were limited published data available on nonhuman primate tuberculosis.Modern immunological techniques have not yet been well applied to the research of nonhuman primate tuberculosis.This fact hampered the progress of tuberculosis research considerably.It is of great importance to develop nonhuman primate tuberculosis models to serve human tuberculosis research.